Your instant feedback and all grading elements

Practice and feedback need to go together as Practice helps you get familiar with all question types, while feedback helps you learn from your mistakes and improve your Duolingo English Test scores. Therefore, we develop instant feedback for all question types in the DET to support your Duolingo English Test preparation journey. 

You should use our instant feedback as a reference to check and improve your mistakes. Our feedback and estimated scores are developed to simulate the certified test to help DET takers prepare the best for the Duolingo English Test. However, there are other elements contributing to your scores. For example, while practicing, you may use dictionaries or other support types to complete your practice which also affects your real scores on your test day in addition to your mood and physical strength. As a result, the best way to utilise the DET Practice Platform is to learn from your mistakes and retry questions after checking our instantly detailed feedback.

As the DET already shared in their official guide, there are two main categories, including question types with correct answers and open response question types. So we will explore instantly detailed feedback in this order. 

I. Question types with correct answers

1. Read and Complete

• Question: 

• Feedback: You can check your Correct words, Missing words, and Incorrect words. Besides we also list out all missing words for your reference to check their meanings and pronunciation.

2. Fill in the Blanks

This is a new question added to the Duolingo English Test from April 02 2024 onwards. Our teams are developing this question to support your preparation. Once it's ready, we will announce it to all users immediately.

In the meantime, you can review this article: DET 2024 Spring Updates to comprehend what will be added and changed from April 02 2024.

3. Read and Select

• Question:

• Feedback: You can check your Correct words, Missing words, and Unreal words. Similar to Read and Complete, you can also check word meanings and pronunciation.

4. Listen and Type

• Question:

• Feedback: You can check all correct, missing, or redundant words you type.

5. Read Aloud 

• Question:

• Feedback: First things first, if you practice Read Aloud questions, you will see the following feedback.

Content, Fluency and Pronunciation are the grading elements in this question type. We only focus on Content because DET takers should see feedback in detail to check if they miss any words or insert unnecessary words, which negatively affects their scores. Regarding Fluency and Pronunciation, DET takers can listen to our sample answer and copy how the speaker reads it aloud for a more effective result. On top of that, if you want Pronunciation and Fluency feedback, it's very simple, let's practice all other Speaking question types that we have the same grading elements as what the Duolingo English Test uses to assess your skills.

6. Interactive Reading

Each Interactive Reading set has 05 different question types; we already shared a detailed article about this section. Kindly check this, “Interactive Reading – What to know and How to practice”. 

After submitting your answer, you can double-click any words to check their meanings and pronunciation. We have full information, including meanings, pronunciations, and synonyms for most of the words. But for some others, we don't have full access yet. So you can recheck them on other digital English dictionaries such as Oxford or Cambridge.

7. Interactive Listening - Listen and Respond

A new set of questions is in the certified Duolingo English Test from 1 May 2023, including Listen and Respond and Summarize the Conversation - an open response question type. 

Here is our Listen and Respond

It's a conversation between you and your peers or professors. To find more details, let's explore everything about Interactive Listening in this article.

After submitting the answer, we have the above feedback so that we can check the whole conversation again and our choices. 

II. Open response question types

Open response question types include Write about The Photo, Speak about The Photo, Interactive Writing, Read then Speak, Listen then Speak, Summarize the Conversation, Writing sample, and Speaking Sample. All the following grading elements are used to evaluate DET takers' answers for all Open response question types.

The above image is shared from the Official Guide for test-takers from the Duolingo English Test. As we develope our instantly detailed feedback similar to these grading elements, let's break down all the above elements into easy-for-reviewing ones.

We have a total of eight (08) grading elements from our feedback:

1. Content; 
2. Coherence: is the discourse coherence;
3. Lexical Sophistication: including formation of words in the lexis (vocabulary);
4. Lexical Diversity: including choice of words in the lexis (vocabulary);
5. Grammatical Accuracy: including punctuation and spelling in the grammar;
6. Grammatical Complexity: is the grammar;
7. Fluency;
8. Acoustic featues: is the Pronunciation;

DET takers need to completely comprehend all the elements in order to get the most out of them. Thus, we will share everything you need to know and understand about the aspects.     

Note:

• Waiting time: The more you write or speak, the longer we need to wait for feedback, especially Speaking questions such as Speaking Sample because we can speak for up to 3 minutes.
• Transcription: If you don't see your Speaking transcribed to text or don't have Pronunciation evaluations, it's normal. Kindly find out more here. 

1. Content

We check if your answer is related to the question asked or not and offer advice for improvement.

It's truly essential to give a relevant answer first because if you don't, we will get zero points.

2. Coherence

We check if your answer is coherently structured and clearly delivers all key important points to answer the question.

3. Lexical Sophistication           

This is the element to show the level of vocabulary used. There is a wide range of vocabulary levels from A1 to C1, and we will show you a detailed evaluation of your performance for both Writing and Speaking questions. You will see the below feedback:  

Since you can learn how many A1, B2, or C1 you just used in your response. The higher the vocabulary level you use, the higher score you get. Therefore, we strongly suggest you apply high-level vocabulary to aim for higher scores.  Unlisted means words that you type incorrectly or your word is not in our vocabulary bank yet. 

If you use too many A1 or A2 levels, you should change to their synonyms but at a higher level.   

You can use the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries or Cambridge Dictionary to check your words’ level.     

4. Lexical Diversity           

Lexical diversity means the variety of word choices you use in your answers. For example, if you receive a topic about your family, you need to mention the word “house”. There are millions of synonymous words such as apartment, condo, home, dormitory, mansion, etc., that you should use besides “house”.    

For each word, you should only use it up to 02 times. The more you work with it, the less score you get because they assess this element based on various word choices.    

If you repeat any words from 03 times except in, on, at, and some others, you will see them in the below list.  

So make sure to learn their synonymous words and retry the question, which is the best way to apply new words into action. This website – Thesaurus, is beneficial to provide you with a list of synonymous words.    

5. Grammatical Accuracy          

This’s one of the most critical aspects as it detects almost every grammatical mistake, spelling mistake, punctuation misuse, and so on.     

You can review our feedback from the below report:  

We will show you one or several possibilities that may fit your situation for each mistake. Therefore, do not worry if you see some words you didn’t intend to deliver.   More importantly, we strongly recommend you retry the question one more time, or even several times, and correct your previous mistakes to help you avoid similar ones in your actual tests.     

*Note: Our tool offers correctness following American English, so if you use British English and get corrected, it's normal and please ignore it. In the DET, we can use both American and British English in any question type (except Read and Complete). The reason that our platform only offers correctness following American English is to maintain the platform speed and encourage students to use American English to ensure not losing points regrettably!

6. Grammatical Complexity

This is another grading element in the large Grammar. This grading element evaluates the variety and level of your grammar. In detail, it checks whether you apply various grammar structures or not, and whether are these high or low-level grammar structures.

There are dozens of different grammar structures at different levels. If DET takers want to aim for high scores, they will surely need to advance their English level and practice using a variety of grammar structures in their everyday practice. DET takers can refer to this article to learn the top five common grammatical structures for higher scores.

From our feedback, we simply read your practice Speaking and Writing answers carefully and give feedback for your Grammatical Complexity.

7. Fluency                     

From April 02 2024, Fluency will only be evaluated for Speaking questions. We offer detailed feedback regarding your Speaking answers and basic advice for improvement.

Please remember that the Duolingo English Test is just another English proficiency test, so you need to speak as much as you can as long as it’s related to the question. 

8. Acoustic Features

This one is for speaking questions only, including Speak about The Photo, Read then Speak, Listen then Speak, and Speaking Sample.    

• Pace: The speed of your speech/ How fast or slow do you speak.
• Pronunciation: The pronunciation quality of your speech. 

This is the central part of Acoustic features because we show you almost every word you pronounce incorrectly.    

If you see the word in red – NOT GOOD, it means the correction rate is less than 70% compared to native speakers. You need to practice pronouncing the words as much as you can.     

If you see the word in orange – AVERAGE, it means the correction rate is from 70% to 85% compared to native speakers. Let’s pay close attention to their phonemes and practice again.    

If you see the word in black – GOOD, it means the correction rate is more than 85% compared to native speakers. Well done! You pronounced it just like native speakers.     

Speaking of NOT GOOD and AVERAGE words, we will display the words, word scores, and phonemes scores so you can know in detail which phoneme you pronounce incorrectly. Therefore, it is super easy to improve your Pronunciation.

Check our video sample feedback from the automatically correcting systems.

III. The difficulty of our DET Practice Platform

DET is an adaptive test in which the difficulty of each question changes dramatically or slightly depending on how test-takers complete previous questions. For example, if test-takers complete this question successfully (100% correct), the next question will be more difficult.

In the DET, there are three difficult levels, including Level 1 (easiest), Level 2 (medium), and Level 3 (most difficult). The Academic team at TADE Hub understands it thoroughly, so we design and put questions in the same order to help test-takers prepare for the test efficiently.

No matter how many scores you want to achieve, from 90 to over 130, it's better to practice all levels to go through all questions, especially Speaking and Writing questions. By doing so, you stand a better chance of achieving your desired scores.

If you don't know where to start your preparation, let's watch this video guide and follow it carefully from the beginning until the end.

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You have thousands of practice questions and instant feedback for every answer you submit, especially Speaking and Writing questions, as you see above. Go to DET Practice Platform to create your FREE account and start experiencing all question types and our correcting systems.