Tips to Topple the TOEFL Teufelc
Written by Kevin (Torus Volunteer)
No, I’m not drunk. In this blog entry, I’m going to discuss the best strategies to help our learners pass the Test Of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL. This is a standardized exam that almost all US universities want non-native English speakers to take as a condition of admission. A good score on the TOEFL can get you admitted with no extra conditions; a mediocre score can get you admitted but with a requirement to take several ESL courses; a poor score can get you denied admission altogether or at best, obligate you to take an entire year’s worth of English classes before you can even start your studies. So our learners who intend to enroll at an American university have a strong incentive to do well on that test.
We’ve all taken standardized tests before. Educational Testing Service, or ETS, creates and administers the SAT, GRE, TOEFL, etc. etc. They tend to stick to a pretty much tried and true format. The TOEFL looks a lot like the English portion of an SAT. There are reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing sections. The only difference is that there is also a speaking section.
My reference in the title above is to the person I call the TOEFL Teufel. “Teufel” means “devil” in German. The TOEFL Teufel is the guy who tries to get you to select the wrong answer. To score well on the TOEFL, you have to outwit the Teufel.
I graduated from University of Oregon in 2011 and was fortunate to have as one of my profs a man who had been writing questions for the SAT and other standardized tests for nineteen years. He wrote a monograph on the subject, which I had the opportunity to read. The most salient takeaway is that it’s quite difficult to write a plausible wrong answer.
Let’s take a a look at a couple of hypothetical SAT questions.
Q: What is the most popular flavor of ice cream in the United States?
Corn
Wood
Key lime
Chocolate
Vanilla
Q: When you frabulate the hypotenuse of a perfect rhomboid that has a surface area of 0.000003 kilometers, what is the result, expressed in furlongs?
4
Purple
Kanye West
-4
176,000,000,012
OK, maybe I am drunk. But the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a hierarchy of answers for every standardized test question, and there’s usually one of each of the following:
The right answer
The almost right answer
The plausible but fundamentally wrong answer
The just plain wrong answer
(Optional, if there are five choices) The really, really wrong answer
So if you simply march your way through the TOEFL, or any other standardized test, and scope out which two answers seem similar, then choose one of them randomly, you’ll score close to fifty percent. That’s because #2, above, in order to be plausible albeit wrong, has to be quite similar to the right answer, #1.
I’ve empirically verified this. When I took the GRE to be admitted into the graduate English program, I was only required to take the English and not the Mathematics section. However, they charged $160 whether you took one or both. So I said fine, I’ll take the Math section, too—even though I had taken exactly one college-level math course in my life and got a B-minus on it. I got a 780 out of a possible 800 on the English section; that, I expected. But I also got a 720 on the Math section.
All I did was use the plausible-answer ranking method I outlined above—doing so helped me to figure out the correct answer some of the time (for the questions I actually had a prayer of understanding) and make a 50-50 guess the rest of the time. Obviously, my guesser was working that day—my score was much higher than it reasonably should have been---but the point is, you can do well on a standardized test even if you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.
This is my first and most important way to beat the TOEFL Teufel. In my next post, I’ll give you several other tips and tricks to pass on to your learners.