TOEFL score, No Pain No Gain

For non-native students who want to apply for a scholarship in International universities, having TOEFL test is one of the requirements. Usually, the minimal score is 500. Some universities even target the minimal TOEFL score of 600.

Achieving those scores is not easy, though. There are three skills which must be mastered equally by the test takers. They are listening, structure, and reading comprehension. In the scoring, these three scores will be converted, added, multiplied by ten, and divided by three.
Thus, being good in one of the skill is not enough.

Many test takers complaint about how difficult it is to get good score from the test. Some people have experienced taking the same test for more than 10 times but nothing change. What is the real problem? One basic point to know about TOEFL test is it measures the knowledge of English from the test takers. Therefore, it is impossible to increase the score if the test takers did not enrich their knowledge about English. Merely learning from a book at a glance is not helping. Learning the materials altogether the night before the test is also futile effort.

The key is learning plan. Just like a football game needs game plan, TOEFL test does too. A student must have been aware of his own knowledge of English and his ability to absorb new material. Knowing this, only the person itself knows how long it takes to prepare for facing the TOEFL test. The next thing to do is searching as many materials to learn as possible. Internet provides many kinds of exercises from listening to reading comprehension. For listening, exposing self to English movies or radio talks, which are also available in the internet, improve learning ability.

Other than having good material sources, it is better to make dateline of learning. For example, I will master from page 1 to 30 in two days. Or I can finish reading ten texts and answer the questions in one day. Probably simple and everybody knows how to do it but only few who actually apply this method.

Finally, if a test taker is serious in doing those steps, undoubtedly the TOEFL score is going to increase. Good luck!