She said about 1,000 new academic programs started accepting the test since the end of January, when standardized testing centers closed in China, bringing the number of programs accepting the DET to about 2,000.ĭuolingo also reports dramatic growth in the number of individual tests taken. “We are seeing pretty staggering growth due to the pandemic in the number of colleges that have started accepting the test,” said Jen Dewar, the head of strategic engagement for the DET. The makers of TOEFL and IELTS both rolled out at-home versions of their own tests after testing centers were forced to close - but not before DET made significant inroads. In any case, DET is no longer the only take-home test around. (Duolingo outlines the security measures it takes on its website.) The critics have also raised questions about the security of an at-home test. They argue that Duolingo’s test, with its focus on word- and sentence-level tasks and paragraph-length writing and speaking prompts, should not be relied upon as a measure of students’ ability to engage with academic texts and use English in a university setting. By contrast, the two largest and most established tests in this space, the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), take about three hours to complete (IELTS takes two hours and 45 minutes), are traditionally administered in testing centers and cost in excess of $200.Ĭritics of the DET say you get what you pay for. Champions of the test praise above all its accessibility: it can be taken online anytime, anywhere, in less than an hour, for the cost of $49. The closure of academic testing centers due to the coronavirus pandemic has been a boon for the Duolingo English Test, a computer-adaptive language proficiency test that can be taken at home in 25 to 35 minutes and that is increasingly used by colleges to determine whether to admit international students.Įven before the pandemic, the DET was gaining ground in college admissions.
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