TOEFL vs. Duolingo English Test: Which Should You Take?

TOEFL vs. Duolingo English Test: which one should you actually take?

I get this question almost every week, usually from a parent or a student who's already stressed enough about applying to college without also having to pick which English test to prove their English on. So let me walk through it the way I would with a student sitting across from me: what each test measures, how schools actually treat the scores, what it costs you in time and money, and then a straight answer for who should pick which.

What each test is actually measuring

TOEFL iBT measures academic English: the kind of English you need to sit through a university lecture, join a seminar discussion, and write a research-style essay. It tests four skills separately (reading, listening, speaking, writing), and several of its tasks are "integrated," meaning you read or listen to something first and then have to speak or write about it. That's deliberate. It's trying to simulate what a semester actually feels like: you don't just read in a vacuum, you read something and then have to talk about it in class or write about it in a paper.

The Duolingo English Test (DET) is built differently. It's a shorter, adaptive test, the questions get harder or easier in real time based on how you're doing, and it blends skills into single item types rather than keeping them in four separate sections. You might see a task that asks you to read a passage and then speak your answer, or listen to a sentence and type what you heard. DET also produces subscores (literacy, comprehension, conversation, production) alongside the overall score, so a school can look at more than just one number if it wants to.

Neither approach is "easier" in any simple sense, they're testing overlapping but not identical things, and a student who's genuinely strong in English should do reasonably well on both. But if I had to summarize the difference in one line: TOEFL is closer to "can you function in an actual university classroom," and DET is closer to "can you understand and produce English quickly and accurately across a range of formats."

How the scores map to university requirements

This is the part where I have to hedge, on purpose, because anyone who gives you exact numbers with total confidence is guessing. Every university sets its own minimum score for both tests, and those minimums vary a lot, by school, by program, and sometimes by department within the same school. A competitive undergraduate program and a graduate program at the same university can have noticeably different requirements.

What I can tell you with confidence: TOEFL has been around for decades and is accepted by essentially every university worldwide that requires English proficiency proof. DET acceptance has grown enormously since 2020, thousands of institutions now take it, including a large share of US universities and a growing number in the UK, Canada, and Australia, but it is not universally accepted the way TOEFL is. Some highly selective programs, some visa-related processes, and some countries still default to TOEFL (or IELTS) and either don't list DET at all or treat it as a secondary option.

The only reliable move here is boring but necessary: pull up the admissions page for every single school on your list and check which tests they accept and what score they want, rather than assuming DET acceptance carries over from one school to the next. Requirements change year to year, too, so don't rely on last year's list of accepted schools.

Cost and turnaround time

Here again I'd rather give you accurate ranges than a fake-precise number that's wrong by the time you read this, both tests periodically adjust pricing. As a rule of thumb, DET has historically been priced meaningfully lower than TOEFL, often somewhere in the range of a third to half the cost, and TOEFL's official registration fee varies further by country. Check each test's official pricing page for your country before you budget, since regional pricing differences are real for both tests.

Turnaround time is where the two tests diverge sharply. DET is taken online, on your own computer, on your own schedule, essentially any time of day, and results are typically available within one to two days. TOEFL iBT is also computer-based and offers frequent test dates (including at-home testing in many regions), but you're booking an actual appointment rather than taking it whenever you want, and official score reporting has traditionally taken longer, commonly around four to eight days, sometimes longer around peak application season. If you're up against a tight application deadline, that gap matters.

Format differences: proctoring, environment, and the adaptive design

DET is remotely proctored through recorded video and AI monitoring, taken at home on your own computer with no test center visit required. That's a genuine convenience, but it also means you need a quiet room, a working webcam and microphone, and a stable internet connection, a bad Wi-Fi day can actually cost you the test. TOEFL iBT can be taken at an official test center or, in many regions, at home under similar remote proctoring; test-center administration adds a commute and a fixed appointment time but also removes some of the "what if my internet drops" anxiety.

The other structural difference is that DET is adaptive: the software adjusts difficulty as you go, which makes the test shorter (usually well under an hour of core testing) but also means two test-takers rarely see the same set of questions, which is part of how it prevents predictable prep patterns. TOEFL is a fixed-form test (everyone taking a given form sees the same overall structure), and it runs longer, with separate timed sections for each of the four skills. If you find long, high-stakes single sittings draining, that's worth factoring in; if you'd rather get it over with quickly, DET's shorter runtime is the more comfortable format.

So who should actually pick which?

If your target schools clearly list a TOEFL minimum and don't mention DET, or if you're applying somewhere selective, graduate-level, or visa-sensitive where DET's acceptance is inconsistent, take TOEFL. It's the safer default precisely because it's been the standard for so long.

If your schools explicitly accept DET, you're working against a tight deadline, cost is a real constraint, or you'd rather test from home on your own schedule without booking a center appointment, DET is a completely legitimate choice and, for a lot of students, the more practical one.

If you're not sure yet which schools you'll end up applying to, or you're building English skills years before any application (which, if you're a middle or high schooler, I'd genuinely encourage), TOEFL is the better long-term investment. It's accepted everywhere DET is accepted, plus a lot of places DET isn't, and its four-skills structure forces you to build reading, listening, speaking, and writing as genuinely separate, real abilities, not just fast pattern recognition across blended item types. That's the same case I make for starting TOEFL over Suneung-style English study in middle school: the skill you build has to outlast the test.

And if you're prepping for either one, the actual skills overlap more than people assume. Strong reading and listening comprehension carries over directly, and practicing speaking under time pressure and writing a structured response under a clock will help you on both tests, not just one. If DET is the one you've landed on, our Duolingo English Test practice hub has free item-type practice built around the real test format, not a generic guess at what it looks like.

The bottom line

Neither test is objectively "better", they're built around different ideas of what proficiency looks like, and the right one depends on where you're applying, how much time you have, and how you'd rather test. Check your target schools' actual requirements first, because that answer overrides everything else in this article. Everything after that, cost, speed, format comfort, is a real but secondary factor.