Average TOEFL Scores for Immigration, Employment, and Grad Programs
The average TOEFL scores for 2024 are about to come out, so I took a look at some historical data. Really interesting stuff! Around August each year ETS, the administer of TOEFL, publishes stats on how students have performed the year before.
For 2023 the global average was 86.6, , with those taking the test for employment purposes or immigration purposes slightly underperforming the average (84.7/85.9 respectively).
| Purpose | Reading | Listening | Speaking | Writing | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 22.3 | 22.3 | 20.8 | 21.2 | 86.6 |
| Employment | 21.6 | 21.9 | 20.5 | 20.7 | 84.7 |
| Immigration | 21.7 | 22.3 | 20.8 | 21.1 | 85.9 |
| Grad Program Applicants | 23.4 | 23.2 | 21.0 | 21.7 | 89.3 |
However grad program applicants (those who self-reported as taking TOEFL for the purposes of applying to masters, phd, but not business school programs) outperformed the global average by quite a bit.
Also super interesting to see data supporting the anecdotes that language exams are not automatic wins for native speakers, who often perform worse at the highest levels than non-native speakers. Danish is linguistically very similar to English, so no surprises there, but Slovenian speakers are rocking our shit!
| Native Language | Reading | Listening | Speaking | Writing | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | 23 | 24 | 24 | 23 | 94 |
| Danish | 24 | 26 | 26 | 23 | 99 |
| Slovenian | 25 | 27 | 25 | 24 | 100 |