TOEFL Debrief (118/120) + Speaking tips

Dear All,

I scored a 118/120 on the TOEFL iBT (2 points deducted from speaking section) and I thought I'd share some of my experience with you.

The test center was OK, the room was actually in the basement, but no windows meant no outside noise, which was certainly beneficial. I had about 20 people with me, the room was filled to about 3/4 of its capacity. Luckily, the computer station next to mine was unoccupied, so I only had to deal with the noise coming from other tables.

For preparation, I used the official guide, some additional speaking practice questions I found with google, the AWA writing template for the essays and the videos posted in this thread:
toefl-instructional-videos-speaking-writing-very-useful-100611.html

These are very helpful and definitely make your life easier.

As far as reading/listening/writing, unfortunately I cannot give you much advice since I'm a lawyer and I work a lot in English. Thus, I did not find the reading/listening/writing parts difficult at all (got a perfect score in each section), I just did the preparation to familiarize myself with the test format.

What I did find very useful though and might help others as well was for the dreaded speaking section.

Use the tips provided in the videos linked above, and practice these a lot. Obviously it can be very frustrating that a lot of people are talking around you during the exam and this can easily disrupt your concentration.

I practiced for this by switching on my TV, the radio, some web radio on my PC, and sat down in between these with my laptop to do my speaking practice (using a recorder and timer software). The important part is to choose channels like CNN, BBC etc. (not a music radio f.e.) because you want people talking all around you about various topics from as many different sources as possible. After a few hours of practice, I completely got used to all the blabbing going on around me, and could completely lock them out and focus on my speaking. This definitely helped a lot on exam day, I wasn't disturbed by the other exam takers at all. (I got the points deductions because I had to stop and completely rephrase one answer at midpoint, and ran out of time at another.)

I hope you can utilize this as well!

Best of luck to you and feel free to ask questions if you have any!