Duolingo English Test

Duolingo English Test

Acronym	DET
Type	Internet-based standardized test
Administrator	Duolingo
Skills tested	English proficiency
Purpose	To assess the English language proficiency of non-native English speakers
Year started	2016; 9 years ago (2016)
Duration	~1 hour
Score range	10–160
Score validity	2 years
Regions	International
Languages	English
Fee	US$80 (2025)
Used by	Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School, Stanford (Undergraduate Admissions), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Undergraduate Admissions), and around 5,500 other institutions
Website	englishtest.duolingo.com

The Duolingo English Test (DET) is a standardized test of the English language designed to be internet-based rather than paper-based. DET is an adaptive test that uses an algorithm to adapt the difficulty of the test to the test-taker.^[1][2][3] It was developed by Duolingo in 2014 as Test Center^[4] and grew in popularity and acceptance at universities during the COVID-19 pandemic.^[5][6][7] The test is used by around 5,500 university admissions offices, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Yale.^[8][9] Ireland accepts the test as part of its student visa program.^[1] Some universities in the United Kingdom, such as the London School of Economics, Imperial College London, Kingston University, the University of Southampton, and Middlesex University, also accept the Duolingo English Test.^[10] Others, such as Oxford University,^[11] Cambridge University^[12] and Lancaster University^[13] do not currently accept Duolingo.

The Duolingo English Test is scored on a scale of 10–160, with scores above 120 considering the test taker to be proficient in English. The test costs less than TOEFL or IELTS.

Comparison to other scoring systems

TOEFL iBT Score (0–120)	IELTS Academic Band (0–9)	Duolingo English Test (10–160)	CEFR
120	8.5–9	160	C2
119	8	155
117–118		150	C1
113–116	7.5	145
109–112		140
104–108	7	135
98–103		130
93–97	6.5	125	B2
87–92		120
82–86	6	115
76–81		110
70–75		105
65–69	5.5	100
59–64		95	B1
53–58	5	90
47–52		85
41–46		80
35–40	4.5	75
30–34		70
24–29		65
18–23	4	60
0–17	0–4	10–55	A2 – A1
Sample: TOEFL iBT data included 328 official score reports and 1,095 self-reported scores. IELTS Academic data included 1,643 official score reports and 4,420 self-reported scores[14]

• Note: the above scores are provided by Duolingo, the company that creates the DET test.^[14]

See also

• English as a second or foreign language
• International Student Admissions Test (ISAT)
• National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI)
• Teaching English as a second or foreign language (TEFL)

References

1. Yim, Noah (March 4, 2022). "Duolingo trying to get government to okay its test for international students". News.com.au. Archived from the original on March 27, 2022. Retrieved June 24, 2022.
2. Liao, Manqian; Attali, Yigal; von Davier, Alina A.; Lockwood, J. R. (July 13, 2022). Wiberg, Marie; Molenaar, Dylan; González, Jorge; Kim, Jee-Seon; Hwang, Heungsun (eds.). "Quality Assurance in Digital-First Assessments". Quantitative Psychology. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics. 393. Cham: Springer International Publishing: 265–276. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-04572-1_20. ISBN 978-3-031-04572-1. Archived from the original on May 28, 2023. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
3. Attali, Yigal; Runge, Andrew; LaFlair, Geoffrey T.; Yancey, Kevin; Goodwin, Sarah; Park, Yena; von Davier, Alina A. (2022). "The interactive reading task: Transformer-based automatic item generation". Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. 5: 903077. doi:10.3389/frai.2022.903077. ISSN 2624-8212. PMC 9354894. PMID 35937141.
4. Lardinois, Frederic (July 23, 2014). "Duolingo Launches Its Certification Program To Take On TOEFL". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 23, 2024.
5. Ollerton, Niamh (April 2020). "Can't Take the TOEFL? Duolingo Might Offer an Alternative". Top Universities. Archived from the original on May 28, 2023. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
6. Morris, Catherine (March 16, 2020). "US: more universities accepting the Duolingo English Test amid coronavirus uncertainty". The PIE News. Archived from the original on May 28, 2023. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
7. Langenfeld, Thomas; Burstein, Jill; von Davier, Alina A. (May 9, 2022). Musso, Mariel F.; Bulut, Okan; Archer, Elizabeth (eds.). "Digital-First Learning and Assessment Systems for the 21st Century". Frontiers in Education. 7. Edited by Mohammed Saqr. doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.857604. ISSN 2504-284X. Archived from the original on January 22, 2024.
8. "Duolingo English Test". englishtest.duolingo.com. Archived from the original on May 28, 2023. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
9. Isaacs, Talia; Hu, Ruolin; Trenkic, Danijela; Varga, Julia (April 3, 2023). "Examining the predictive validity of the Duolingo English Test: Evidence from a major UK university". Language Testing. 40 (3): 748–770. doi:10.1177/02655322231158550. ISSN 0265-5322. S2CID 257975807.
10. Honebeek, Talya (2024). "Which top UK universities accept the Duolingo English Test?". edvoy. Archived from the original on December 14, 2022. Retrieved December 14, 2022.
11. "Oxford University English Language Requirements". Retrieved January 21, 2025.
12. "Cambridge University English Language Requirements". Retrieved January 21, 2025.
13. "Lancaster University English Language Requirements". Retrieved January 21, 2025.
14. "Duolingo English Test". englishtest.duolingo.com. Archived from the original on September 24, 2023. Retrieved August 23, 2023.

Sources

• Yancey, Kevin P.; Settles, Burr (August 20, 2020). "A Sleeping, Recovering Bandit Algorithm for Optimizing Recurring Notifications". Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining. New York: ACM. pp. 3008–3016. doi:10.1145/3394486.3403351. ISBN 9781450379984. Archived from the original on May 3, 2024. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
• McCarthy, Arya D.; Yancey, Kevin P.; Settles, Burr; Liao, Manqian; Egbert, Jesse; LaFlair, Geoff T. (2021). "Jump-Starting Item Parameters for Adaptive Language Tests". Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 883–899. doi:10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.67.
• D. W., Liya Astarilla (2019). "The Effect of Duolingo on English as Foreign Language University Students' Vocabulary Mastery". Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Social, Economy, Education and Humanity. SCITEPRESS | Science and Technology Publications. pp. 209–215. doi:10.5220/0009104502090215. ISBN 978-989-758-464-0. Archived from the original on May 3, 2024. Retrieved May 28, 2023.

External links

• Official website