Not that long ago, the division was clearer. Foreign students seeking admission to 'Western' universities took the TOEFL examination to give admissions officers a numerical rating of their English language skills if they planned to go to American universities, and those seeking admission to universities in the UK, Australia and often Canada took the IELTS (International English Language Testing Service) examination.

Now, increasing numbers of American universities are gladly accepting IELTS “band” scores as the measure of their applicants’ English-language skills. There are a number of possible reasons, some of them factual, others more conjectural.

Over the years, the IELTS exam has become steadily more respected as an examination. Famous – some would say infamous – for its difficulty (some would say trickiness), it is a more complex exam that measures more specific skills than the TOEFL exam does. In particular, they are the Speaking Task – done in the company of a 'live' examiner – that measures a candidate’s ability to use the spoke language over a range of levels, from the more routinely conversational to the more formally presentational. The other is the report that constitutes IELTS’ Writing Task 1, which requires a candidate to take data presented in a graphic form and write about the information presented in words (and, when appropriate, carefully selected numbers and/or other forms of data).

Both of these additional elements are ones that reflect particular skills most graduate students – studying in any country – will actually need to succeed, both in their coursework and in daily living (not inaccurately referred to by the IETLS administration as 'survival skills').

This is not to say that IELTS is a better test than TOEFL. It is criticized for other short-comings, prominent among them the slowness with which it has developed its computer-based test. Still, there is increasing evidence that its reliability as a measure of English-language skills is at least as good as TOEFL’s (even if its use of grammar and spelling is based on the British rather than the American norms).

American universities – on average still the most expensive anywhere in the world, not to mention the cost of living in the US while studying – are, increasingly, as interested in attracting foreign students, for reasons of student-population diversity as well as revenue, as their 'Commonwealth' counterparts more famously are. So, an increasing number of them – beginning with some of the best, most famous and most sought-after by foreign students – now accept IELTS scores in lieu of TOEFL scores.

While this is an advantage for foreign students with easier access to IETLS testing sites than to TOEFL ones, it could potentially cause problems for any candidate assuming that IELTS is an acceptable substitute for TOEFL. In fact, it is now one more thing foreign students need to be sure about. Before you assume that the American university to which you are applying accepts IETLS band scores instead of TOEFL scores, do the research you need to be sure.

Hugh Nelson is an e-learning specialist who has worked in the education industry for more than 10 years. He currently lives in Hong Kong and is a director of UniRoute, a company that runs educational websites helping students prepare and successfully apply for post-graduate studies abroad.

Hugh Nelson
http://www.ielts-plan.com/