dookdig

Unfortunately, my appointing day, yesterday, was just passing by. :( I never realize that my G-day is Aug 8 not Aug 18. :( What would be the consequence of this absence? Will it be recorded for the next 5 years?

Go for it. That's all I would suggest.

Your quality of essay can be interpreted on IBT TOEFL score at around 28-30. It is great with strong cohesion from one sentence to another and also it is well-articulated. In addition, I believe that no one can achieve high score on writing with low score on reading. In other words, one's skills will be at about same level and there will not be much discrepancy in his/her skills. As a result, you will probably get more than 100. Believe me or not. ;)

I had ever asked ETS to rescore my speaking two times. I got lower score once and the same score on another. But you should try anyway if you are really sure that you deserve more. Ps. good score, well-spread, no remarked weak-point.

I believe they will refund it soon.

You might get only 5 passages since there has never been 6 passages in reading section.

I believe "replenishment" means "refill". ;) The only way to answer this type of questions very effectively is to know the meaning even without looking at the contexts around. Though this sounds weird, it is the good way to avoid distracting information. All questions that ask for meaning of vocabularies are created by specialists who know how to set pitfalls for nonnative speakers. In other words, they even know that what kind of choices will perfectly trap students who try to educately guess from the contexts. At least two choices will fit to the sentences if you don't know the exact meaning.

It took 50 minutes to write this essay so it might look lengthy. :) Also, I didn't check any grammar mistakes so there were plenty of them around. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do many tasks at the same time or concentrating on one task? Many people prefer to concentrate all efforts on one task to be certain that it will be finished effectively. On the other hand , some people tend to deal with all tasks at the same time by claiming that it will yield better overall performance. In this discussion, I shall present arguments favoring the former statement and refuting the latter statement. On the constraint competition in an automobile industry between Toyota, the Japanese company, and BENZ , the European company, during 1985 and 1990, it were obvious that Toyota which applied “SUQK” , the working system to maximize the performance on one particular task , won this competition over Benz which held strong belief in “TQM”, the multitask management system . It is interesting to study further on how “SUQK” did play an important role in this success. Toyota had ever been mentioned as a primitive company during 1970s. Its products usually cast doubt on how such cars could be of low quality. Conversely, Not only Benz had better reputation on its product’s quality but also it is claimed to serve the best service. This situation continued to the point that Toyota experienced the financial crisis from its lack of customer’s needs .Its last attempt to regain its competitiveness is to apply ”SUQK” ,a rigorous working system, to help reducing loss in production line and maximize its profit by serving best service with all its efforts. Fortunately, this working system of setting priority on most important aspects did very well on improving overall performance which helped Toyota regain its reputation. Toyota succeeded in recovering its status from nearly bankrupted to the most outstanding profitable company in investor viewpoints. However, Benz situation turned to be worse since its application of “TQM”. Its attempt to satisfy different groups of customers yield such a failure result which many of its ex-customers mentioned that Benz has lose its stand point on offering the best products to its customers by reducing cost of production which yielded worse quality. In addition, another attempt to offer all kind of services drove its quality of service on fixing cars to be worse. Its new car renting service can not even compete with the small player in that market. In other words, its reputation doesn’t help much to gain new targets at this point. As a result, Benz experienced the first financial loss in 1987 from its lack of customer satisfaction and its marketing standpoint. This continued to the critical point that it needed to rehabilitate its financial problem and reposition its market. It took almost ten years to recover the situation back . Even though , Benz had ever been known for its offering of best cars and best services, it conspicuously experienced such a crisis due to an application of multitask working system. In other words, its attempt to deal with many tasks at the same time made it lose concentration on particular task and yielded less quality of both products and services. On the contrary , Toyota can recover its financial problem and regain its leading position in an automobile market by applying a concentration strategy. Hence, it is by far more plausible that concentration on one task is more practical than multitask management.

I didn't practice for this topic;however, I can show my practice essay on another topic.

mNeo, I forgot to tell you that the difficulty in cracking Kaplan test is mainly from an order of questions which is really disorganized so I had a hard time to find where in the whole passage the questions did ask for answers. However,the difficulty of contents is not very different from the actual TOEFL.

Your essay looks resemble to mine in that it intergrates examples as main part of whole body. So, I guess you would get 4/5 in this independent task. :)

Congrats Frenz!!! Sadcat, Accoding to this introduction, you create a lenghty run-on sentence with too many transition words.--> However, as we know money is the root of all evil therefore, I think asking for money from a friend can be risky for the friendship, because my friend will lose trust on me, if you would not be able to give him money back as I promised. Although is one of transition words. You need to use it to connect two sentences together not just one sentence alone. --> Although people argue that borrowing money from a friend is better. Check grammar on tense in "if clauses" --> my friend would lose confidence on me, if I were(not would) not able to give him the loan back on time You need to concern about parallel structure on this sentence. --> if a friend lend me some money and I would promised him that I will return him that money with in one month and then due to some reason I would not able to give him money back would be able --> if I would not able to give the money back Just for kidding, I think we now are struggling in a deep forest. There are bunches of "would" around. :) You misused "will" in if clause --> if I will beg my friend for loan Don't use "will" in this sentence If I bla bla bla, I will ..... Correct If I will bla bla bla, I will .... Wrong Third reason you argued makes over all claims weaker. Why do you want to keep a good relationship with such friends who don't even consider you as their friend? In my opinion, I would be grateful to discontinue such a dishonest relation by means of "borrowing money". :) Your conclusion is too short. I'm not sure about this but I will improve vocabulary usage at least to make over all sentences looks not too dull. Also, don't stick with too many same sentence structure like "if clause" for whole paragraph. However, I really like this sentence. It makes me smile. :) Cell phones, pagers and blackberries are also the necessities of our lives. Some raters will get confused by blackberries since they consider it as fruit not as digital devices. :)

In my opinion, it will be graded 3.5 from 5 according to rubic scoring system. If you could make fewer grammar mistakes, you will definitely get 4. ETS requires length of independent writing for only at least 300 words. Your essay seems too long. You could make it shorter and spend time on correcting grammar mistakes.

From what I knew, Kaplan test is kinda harder than real TOEFL but this doesn't mean your performance on actual test day will be better than yours on Kaplan test. I have ever taken Kaplan mini TOEFL at its institution in NYC. I got 31/36 on reading and 24/29 on listening. My real performance on TOEFL : Reading average at 27/30, Max at 29/30, Listening average at 26/30, Max at 28/30. Let's say your performance will vary from 25-29 on test day depending on your luck which plays an important role in questions that ask for meaning of vocabulary. Hope this help.

Yeah, I know it contains lots of mistakes. ;) This is kind of essay that is graded 4/5 in rubic scoring system or 25 points from total 30 points in writing part. From my experience, only few elite universities required for more than 25 points in writing part. so I think it still works to some degrees though it is imperfect .:D

According to what I have known from an admission representative via email, Getting score more than 95/120 is enough to meet requirement of 100/120 given that universities I'm going to apply do not strict that much in this English proficiency criteria.So, I decide to move on and will start studying GRE soon. I plan to apply to universities in NYC region, might be Baruch, Fordham, City college, etc., , since I can subsidize my living expense from my aunt's helpness.:p

Your score seems resemble to mine : R29 L26 S17 W27. I guess you need 100/120. To get that, you need 19 in speaking--improving from limited,limited,fair (17) to fair,fair,fair (19) in all subscores. It seems hard but worth trying. From my own rescoring experience, I get lower score 1 time : 17 reduced to 15 and same score at 17 for another time.

Please let your wife shed us some light on how to get good score. [clap]

sad cat I respect those people's decision to stop taking TOEFL according to what they experienced. I can't hardly say I don't agree with them since I'm also suspected ETS scoring system. However, my requirement for Master's degree is IBT 100/120. It doesn't hurt much to fulfill this requirement. But for people who need 26 in speaking, I totally understand their pain and how much they are suffered from this energy-consuming test. ETS never clearly states the criterias it looks for in speaking part. In fact, even some raters use their own different criterias to score us. Some of them base their judgement more on how our accents are while some of them look for perfect answer which comprises of intellectual words. According to this subtle and unstable scoring system, I'm sure that the reason that some of us who can not break requirement of 26 in speaking is their accents which don't sound like Americans. No matter how great your answers are, some( I mean majority of them) raters will score you 3 from 4 in rubic scoring system which will translate to 24/30 --> not enough :yuck: Furthermore, some raters have negative bias toward some accents especially east asian accents. I believe when they listened to these accents their minds have already set up that giving score of 2or3 from 4 would be more than enough for such inferior students who was born in inferior races speaking with inferior accents and being citizens of inferior countries!! Sad :( but believe or not it is true. I hope that this doesn't discourage you again :p and also hope that Knok and his fellows will win this case over ETS :tup: . I believe that to win this case they need some evidences of discrimination to substantiate their claims. Anyway, if you need 100/120, it's not that hard to achieve and universities still accept any score from 95 or higher. Not that strict like pharmaceutical license that require 26/30 in speaking.:crazy:

could you shed us some light on how to get great score in speaking? How do you practice? Do you have any templates for answering? Which country are you from? I believe this will help all of us who still struggle with only speaking while getting 29 or full score on other three parts. Thanks for your advice

Great score [clap] Can you show us how much you got on each part?

yes, you will get the 60$ back. threat means I stuck in IBT for many times because of getting low speaking score. Since I decide to rescore the speaking, I hope not to get the same score but ETS just played some joke by giving me the same score as previous. That means my 60$ payment will not be refunded back. I got nothing but losing 60$.

Normally, they will refund but I'm not that sure if that happens to all cases.

Akatsuki, you don't have to pay for this rescoring. ETS will refund your money back to your credit card within 14 days. I am suffered from this threat also since my rescoring result is not different from the previous one. This means my payment of 60$ will not be refunded !!:(

No,I didn't take a test on March 3 ,2007. I took this same whole test on August 26, 2006!! This is almost 7 months apart but we got the same whole test. Smell fishy, doesn't it? :hmm: This fact interests me that we should practice every previous speaking questions, vocabularies and writing topics that other test takers who already took tests at various times during the year has ever mentioned in this forum. I believe that if everyone in this community help each other by posting every questions s/he experienced. In about one year, we should have enough accumulation of previous tests. To break the requirement of 100 points would be easy and to nail 26 scores in speaking wouldn't be too far-fetch to achieve. :tup: