Hi everyone,

I took the TOEFL last week and received my scores today. I scored 110, with 30 in both reading and listening, 28 in speaking, and solely 22 in writing. Please don't get me wrong, I am really happy with the total score. Yet, there's no way that my writing score is correct, so I would like to hear your advice.

Here's the deal:
My writing based on reading and listening was judged fair (2.5-3.5) while my writing based on knowledge and experience was rated good (4.0-5.0).

I've got 2 problems with that:

1. I thought that I've done very well on both essays. I can perfectly recall the integrated writing task and I am 100% sure that I have understood both the passage and the lecture, including the entire content and the structure. As fas as I know, you're not supposed to state your own opinion in this task. So I've first summarized the reading passage, and second both summarized the lecture and outlined how the lecture was related to the text. I am very confident that I've used a wide range of vocab and made hardly any (if at all) mistakes. In addition, I definitely exceeded the minimum amount of words that ETS recommends.

2. I have taken the TOEFL 2 years before. Back then, I effortlessly scored 27 in the writing passage. In the meantime, I have written lots of papers for university classes, all of them in English. My writing style was never criticized, quite the opposite, it always received a top score. Finally, my AWA-part in the GMAT was awarded the maximum number of points, 6.0.

Funnily enough, I never expected to have achieved 30 in Listening and 28 in Speaking.


I need the TOEFL in order to apply at a renowned university. What do you recommend me to do? Simply accept it or pay for a re-evaluation? Does anyone of you have any experience with those re-evaluations?

Thanks a lot for your help! I'll really appreciate it.