 Hello my people, my name is Meacham, and I have something interesting to tell you. I, a native speaker of English, have finally taken an English language test. So today I'm gonna explain to you every single exercise that is on the Duolingo test, just to give you an overview of what the test is like, how you take it, and you might even see some dramatic re-enactments of me taking that test along the way. The first thing you have to do before you can even take the test is go to Duolingo's website, create an account, and pay for the test. It's $49, you can pay with credit cards, paypal, whatever. After you pay for it, you'll get a link to download some software that you have to put on your computer. It will check to make sure that you don't have any extra monitors. It'll also check to see if your camera and microphone are working. So once it has determined that everything is up to code, it'll let you start the test. Once you are ready to take the test, you will have to accept Duolingo's eight commandments. First, thou shalt not cover thine ears. Second, thou shalt keep thou eyes on the screen at all times. Third, thou shalt not have any other devices before thee. Four, thou shalt have no other people in thy room. Five, thou shalt not speak unless asked to. Six, thou shalt show Duolingo a valid government-issued photo ID. Seven, thou shalt not take notes. And eight, thou shalt keep thy face in the camera box at all times. With the terms and conditions accepted, I was able to start the Duolingo test. So let's talk about some of these exercises that were on the test that I took. Let's start with the ones I hate the most, the vocabulary exercises. I detest these. Ah. There's two ways that this works. One is where they give you a list of words and you simply have to mark which words are real words. The other form of this exercise is oral, meaning you click on the buttons and the sound will play the word like so. Hot, hot, hot. You then simply mark which of the words are real and which ones are fake. Now, every exercise on the Duolingo test is timed, including these ones. You will have like one minute to mark all of the correct or incorrect ones. If you don't get it done in that time, it just automatically moves you on to the next exercise. So because this test only takes about 45 minutes to complete, you got to move fast. All right, so after these vocabulary exercises- Maybe migration has spread the culinary traditions of the subcontinent throughout the world. Yeah, the dictation exercises. So the dictation exercises work like this. You basically click the button and go to the next question and if it's an audio dictation exercise, it will immediately start playing just like it did before. You then have to type and write exactly what you hear. These audios are never more than like one sentence long and all you have to do is just copy it exactly. Since it starts playing right away and you're not really prepared for it, you're probably gonna need to use one of your two additional clicks to listen to it again. And then the opposite of these dictation exercises is where they give you the sentence and you have to record it into the mic. Be careful when you record these things because you only get one chance to record any message. If you screw it up, it's over. There's no redoing your recording. And if you accidentally click next like I did on one of these without recording anything, it doesn't even give you the chance to go back and record it. There's like zero opportunity for mistakes when it comes to these recordings. From here, the test opens up a little bit. You're gonna have some open-ended questions. For example, there are speaking exercises where you will be given your choice of two topics and then talk for a couple of minutes. They ask you to speak for at least 30 seconds but they give you about two minutes to use so you probably should use all of the time available to you. I generally did about a minute and a half to two minutes for all of my replies. Was that enough to get me a good score? You're gonna have to stick around. The results are at the end. Another variant of these included photos. They put a very, very tiny, and I mean very tiny image on the screen which you had to talk about for a couple of minutes. The writing parts of the test are basically the same as the speaking parts except instead of recording yourself, you just type in your answer. Similar to the speaking exercises, there are pictures that they ask you to describe. They don't really give you a clear idea of how much they want you to say. They say in a few sentences, I put in like two or three. Again, there's a time limit on every exercise so it's kind of a question of how much can you do in 30 seconds to a minute for most of these things. And again, like the speaking part, there are also exercises for writing where you are given a choice of two topics and you have to decide which one you wanna write about and then you go ahead and write your answer. Now, all these exercises come in more or less random order. They don't seem to have any sort of pattern, at least not that I could tell and there wasn't any sort of difficulty curve. It didn't get more difficult as you went. So you'll probably do about three of each of these exercises from what I could tell. However, at the very end of the test, there are two distinct exercises that you have to do. These are basically like bigger versions of the choice speaking and choice writing exercises. These interview questions don't actually count towards your grade according to Duolingo, but they are delivered to the universities that you apply to. So it's kind of like a bit of an opportunity to show off and really do your best, but it's also not gonna influence your grade so it's kind of unclear what these are for exactly. And that's about all there is to it. I understand now why a lot of universities abroad are not taking this test. To be honest, even though it does take efforts to make sure that the test environment is secure, nobody asked me to show them the whole room. There was no proof that my phone was nowhere else to be seen. I could have easily had it like right down here and my eyes could have just done this and I probably could have cheated on this test if I wanted to. But the other aspect that I think is more important is the academic side of this. This test doesn't really test your reading or listening skills that well. I mean, there's not a single long form reading or listening in this entire test. You will not have to read one article or one essay. You will not have to listen to a long conversation or a monologue from a professor. And I don't really understand how you're gonna test people's university level reading and listening if you don't do those things. However, plenty of universities in the United States have adopted the Duolingo test in the recent year. So maybe it's a good idea for you to take it. Personally, I don't think it's a very difficult test and it might be easier for you to take the Duolingo than it is for the IELTS or the TOEFL. So are you ready to see my scores? Ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary's, drum roll, please. Check it out. So I didn't get a perfect score. I did pretty well, but not a perfect result anyway. I didn't finish one of the recordings. I just clicked next by accident instead of actually doing the recording first. I'm not sure if it's because I didn't fill out enough information on some of the writings why my grade has dropped in other areas. But the bottom line is I put in about 40% effort and did this in 40 minutes and I got pretty high scores and I could've tried harder. So I wanna do this test again and see if I can beat my own score. If you need help raising your score then you need to go to prepwithscore.com. We're also right now working on a series of video tutorials that also include practice materials specifically designed for the Duolingo test. So stay tuned, subscribe to the channel because when we launch that program we're gonna let you know here. Hit us up if you need something. And if you want me to do another English test just leave a comment below and tell me which one you want me to take. Not gonna lie, I actually do have to take a really high level English test soon because to finally get my degree here in Peru I have to prove that I speak English. The irony is not lost on me but it could be fun. I can make content out of it. So I'm looking at doing something pretty advanced soon so we'll see how that goes. I'll see you next time.