The TOEFL speaking rubric is the set of rules the raters use to score your speaking. This page explains it in plain words: how Listen and Repeat and the Speaking Interview are scored from 0 to 5, how the Speaking band from 1 to 6 is built, and where our learners lose points. It covers both tasks in the current TOEFL Speaking test.
Table Of Contents
What Is the TOEFL Speaking Rubric?
The TOEFL iBT speaking rubric is ETS's scoring guide for the two speaking tasks. Each of the 7 Listen and Repeat sentences and each of the 4 Interview answers gets a score from 0 to 5. TOEFL speaking grading combines AI scoring and certified human raters. The 11 scores become one Speaking section score on a band from 1 to 6.
ETS uses two TOEFL speaking rubrics, one for each task. Listen and Repeat is scored as a whole: how completely and clearly you reproduce the sentence. The Interview is scored on fluency, intelligibility, language use, and organization. ETS does not publish the weight of each task in the band.
TOEFL Speaking Band Scores and CEFR Levels
Your TOEFL speaking score is a band from 1 to 6 in half-point steps, and each band matches a CEFR level. The table shows the match, as published by ETS.
TOEFL band |
CEFR level |
|---|---|
6 | C2 |
5 to 5.5 | C1 |
4 to 4.5 | B2 |
3 to 3.5 | B1 |
2 to 2.5 | A2 |
1 to 1.5 | A1 |
Most universities that ask for the TOEFL ask for band 4 or higher in Speaking, which means B2. Check the exact band your school wants.
TOEFL Listen and Repeat Rubric
The TOEFL Listen and Repeat rubric is one 0 to 5 scale for each sentence, and it measures how much of the sentence you repeat and how clearly. In plain words:
- 5: you repeat the sentence exactly and every word is clear.
- 4: you keep the meaning with a small change of word or grammar.
- 3: you say a full sentence, but the meaning is not the original one.
- 2: a large part of the sentence is missing or wrong.
- 1: only a few words, most of the sentence is missing.
- 0: no answer, or nothing understandable.
Our learners average 63% on 46,438 Listen and Repeat attempts, and our tutors score their pronunciation 2.7 out of 4 in full tests. The points go on word endings such as -s and -ed and on stress on the wrong syllable, which turn a 5 into a 4 or a 3.
TOEFL Speaking Interview Rubric
The TOEFL speaking interview rubric scores each of your four answers from 0 to 5 on four things: fluency, intelligibility, language use (vocabulary and grammar), and organization. In plain words:
- 5, fully successful: on topic and well elaborated, with a good conversational pace, clear pronunciation, and accurate grammar and vocabulary.
- 4, generally successful: on topic and elaborated, but the ideas may lack effective connectors.
- 3, partially successful: answers the question with limited elaboration.
- 2, mostly unsuccessful: only minimally connected to the question.
- 1, unsuccessful: only vaguely connected to the question.
- 0: no answer, or nothing understandable.
In 6,100 Interview answers reviewed by our tutors, grammar was the lowest score in 92%: grammar averaged 2.4 out of 4 and pronunciation 3.8. In 16,742 answers scored by our AI, Support and Development was the lowest score in 68%, which means the learner answered but gave no reason or example. Longer answers score higher: about 62 words at a score of 2.5 and 85 words at a score of 4.
How BestMyTest Scores Your TOEFL Speaking Practice
When you record an answer for review, our AI review and our tutors score it on seven TOEFL speaking scoring criteria: task fulfillment, pronunciation and intonation, flow and speech, correct grammar usage, vocabulary usage, support and development, and connections and coherence. The AI scores each from 0 to 5 and the score report turns the mean into your band, scaled to 6 and rounded to the nearest half point.
In 10,070 scored practice test Speaking sections, the average was band 3.5. 48% of learners reached band 4 and 5% reached band 5.
Figures are from the BestMyTest TOEFL learner performance data: about 65,000 TOEFL speaking answers reviewed by BestMyTest tutors, 88,000 recordings scored by our speech scoring, and 10,070 scored practice test sections, between 2016 and 8 October 2026. Tutor criterion figures are out of 4 and AI figures out of 5, as labelled. Last updated 8 October 2026.
How to Raise Your TOEFL Speaking Score
The rubric rewards answers that are complete, clear, and correct, and our data says grammar and development are where the points go. Grammar was the lowest score in 92% of tutor-reviewed Interview answers, and two out of three AI-scored answers lost most on Support and Development.So give every Interview answer a reason and an example, and fix the grammar mistakes a review shows you. In Listen and Repeat, say the end of every word and keep the stressed syllable long.
Practice on our TOEFL speaking practice guide, use the TOEFL speaking templates for the seven Interview answer structures, and get your recordings reviewed. A free Sample Test 1 gives you both tasks under the real time limits.