# How Is the New TOEFL Scored?

From your raw answers to your final band — the mechanism explained step by step.

## The short version

Each of the four sections — Reading, Listening, Speaking, Writing — gets its own score on a 1.0–6.0 scale, in half-point steps. Your overall score is simply the **average of the four section scores, rounded to the nearest half band**. There's no separate "total points" system like the old 0–120 scale — the new scale is the section average, full stop.

## Step 1 — Reading and Listening: objective, percentage-based

These two sections are auto-scored against fixed answer keys — no human or AI judgment involved. Your raw score (number correct ÷ total items) converts to a 1–6 band through a percentage-to-band table. Get roughly the top tier of questions right, and you land in the 5.5–6.0 range; a middling percentage lands you in the 3.5–4.5 range, and so on down the scale. This is exactly how a multiple-choice test has always been scored — the new part is just reporting it on 1–6 instead of a raw point total.

## Step 2 — Speaking and Writing: rubric-graded

These sections involve actual production (spoken or written responses), so they're graded against an official rubric rather than a fixed answer key. Each task is scored on specific criteria: Speaking is judged on delivery (pace, clarity, pronunciation), language use (grammar, vocabulary), and topic development (did you actually answer the question with real content); Writing is judged on development, organization, and language use. Each criterion is scored, and the task's overall band comes from combining them. If a section has more than one task (like Speaking's two tasks, or Writing's three), the section score is the average of its task bands.

## Step 3 — combining into an overall score

Once all four sections have a band (1.0–6.0 each), your overall score is their average, rounded to the nearest 0.5. So a candidate scoring Reading 5.0, Listening 4.5, Speaking 4.0, and Writing 4.5 gets an overall of 4.5 (the average of 5.0+4.5+4.0+4.5=18, divided by 4 = 4.5). There's no weighting — all four sections count equally toward the overall.

## Why this matters for how you prepare

Because the overall is a simple average, your *weakest* section drags the total down the most relative to how much room it has to improve — a section already at 5.5 has little room to add to your average, while a section at 3.5 has a lot. If your goal is to move your overall band efficiently, time spent on your weakest section usually returns more than the same time spent polishing your strongest one.

## What "adaptive" changes (and doesn't)

Reading and Listening use a multistage adaptive format — the specific items and difficulty can shift based on your performance as you go. This affects which questions you see, not how the resulting percentage converts to a band; the scoring math in Step 1 above is unchanged by adaptivity. See our full [adaptive format explainer](https://toefl-exam-prep.com/blog/toefl-adaptive-explained) for details.

## What each band actually represents

For the full breakdown of what 1.0 through 6.0 mean in terms of real ability (and their CEFR equivalents), see our [band scores explained](https://toefl-exam-prep.com/blog/toefl-band-scores-explained) guide. For the old 0–120 equivalent, see our [score conversion chart](https://toefl-exam-prep.com/blog/toefl-score-conversion-chart).

## Find your current section-by-section breakdown

A free diagnostic gives you an estimated band per section, not just an overall number — so you can see exactly where the averaging is working for or against you.