TOEFL iBT

TOEFL is one of the two most widely accepted English proficiency tests for university admission, alongside IELTS. It is administered by ETS and accepted by more than twelve thousand institutions, scholarship programmes and immigration authorities.

On 21 January 2026 the test was redesigned, and the change was substantial: Reading and Listening now adapt to your performance, several task types were retired and three new ones introduced, and scoring moved to a band scale. Preparation material written for the previous format describes a test that no longer exists.

Format

Because Reading and Listening adapt, the exact question count and timing vary from one candidate to another. Most people see somewhere between 35 and 48 questions in total.

How the adaptive sections work

Reading and Listening are delivered in stages rather than as one fixed set. Everyone begins at a standard difficulty, and performance on that first stage determines whether the second stage is drawn from an easier or a harder pool.

The stage you are routed into sets a ceiling on the band you can reach.Speaking and Writing are not adaptive. They are the same for everyone.

A candidate sent to the easier second stage cannot achieve the top band however many questions they go on to answer correctly, because those questions are not difficult enough to distinguish that level of performance. The opening minutes of each section therefore carry more weight than their share of the questions suggests. The same routing logic, in detail.

The 1–6 band scale

Each section is reported on a 1.0 to 6.0 scale in half-point steps, aligned to the CEFR framework. The overall score is the average of the four section bands, rounded to the nearest half band.

During a transition period running to 2028, score reports also carry a comparable score on the legacy 0–120 scale, so universities that still publish requirements in the old numbers can convert between the two. Check which scale a requirement is written in: many institutions are still updating their pages.

What our practice covers

Listening covers all four of the 2026 task types with original audio: Choose a Response, Conversation, Announcement and Academic Talk. Reading uses original academic passages with the comprehension question types the section is built on. Both are delivered as fixed sets rather than with the adaptive routing of the real test, which is something you meet on the day.

Writing covers the Academic Discussion task, which survived the redesign, with instant feedback on the band scale. Speaking requires microphone input and is not part of the simulation.