This post is for all our students taking the TOEFL in India! We know that a lot of our blog readers aren’t from the US, so we’re planning to write a series of posts dedicated to students in other countries. Let us know if there’s another country in particular that you’d like to see a post for in the comments below. 🙂 First up, we’ll talk about how TOEFL students in India perform on the test.
How many international students in the US are from India?
Indian students make up a large percentage of international students studying in America. During the 2013/2014 school year, they made up 11.6% of all international students! That’s second only to China. That means that a LOT of students are taking the TOEFL each year in India.
What is the average TOEFL iBT score in India?
Drum roll, please! The average overall score in India is 91. The average for each section is as follows:
Reading = 22
Listening = 23
Speaking = 23
Writing = 23
How does this score data fit into worldwide averages?
We can see the average TOEFL scores of the entire population of TOEFL test takers by looking at the TOEFL score percentiles (you can see a percentile chart in Table 2 on page 5 of this research from ETS). The average of all test takers is about an 84. For reading the average is between 21 and 22; listening, 21; speaking, 20-22; and writing, 21-22. This means that the TOEFL scores in India are, in general, higher than the worldwide average…
…But, what does this information mean?
This data is helpful when it comes to comparing the TOEFL performance of a given test-taker with the scores of other test-takers within the same nation. So, if you live in India, this information is useful in comparing your performance to your peers.
If you don’t live in India, this information is not particularly useful — for example, if you live in France and compare your scores to these averages, that’s not going to tell you a whole lot. Why? Because comparing data country to country doesn’t take into account a lot of important differences between each country: the number of test takers in each country, how early students start studying English, how many hours students study English in school (if they even do!), and so on.
So, for all our Indian students, you should use this information as just another data point in the quest for YOUR perfect TOEFL score. And if you need more help figuring out what that score is, check out these posts:
TOEFL Scores for Top Universities
What is a Good TOEFL Score?
How can you learn more about TOEFL test dates, registration, etc in India?
For those of you taking the exam in India, here are some additional resources:
TOEFL India Official Facebook Page
Test Dates and Locations in India
TOEFL Go Anywhere
Registration
PS. All data mentioned in this post is from ETS’s research report on scores, found here. 🙂
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