Question Types With Correct Answers
For Read and Complete, Read and Select, Fill in the Blanks, Listen and Type, Complete the Sentences, Complete the Passage, Highlight the Answer, Identify the Idea, Title the Passage, Listen and Complete, and Listen and Respond, test questions are graded automatically through special procedures developed specifically for each question type. These procedures compare your responses to correct responses, then evaluate the similarities and differences. You can read about how this works in the Duolingo English Test Technical Manual, available at englishtest.duolingo.com/research.
The good news: You won’t be penalized more for entering an incorrect response rather than skipping the question. If your answer isn’t entirely correct, you will receive partial credit. For example, in Read and Complete, you will receive the same score for a blank or an incorrect response. For Listen and Type, you will be penalized more for missing a word than mistyping the word. In other words, it is always best to try to answer a question.
Open Response Question Types
Summarize the Conversation, Write About the Photo, Speak About the Photo, Interactive Writing, Read Then Speak, Interactive Speaking, Writing Sample, and Speaking Sample are open response questions, and your answer will be evaluated by a grading engine.
The grading engine is trained to understand your English proficiency just like expert human raters.
Some of the aspects it evaluates include:
- content: relevance, style, development, and effect on the reader
- discourse coherence: clarity, cohesion, progression of ideas, and structure (for writing questions only)
- lexis (vocabulary): lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, choice of words, formation of words, and spelling (for writing questions only)
- grammar: grammatical complexity, grammatical accuracy, and punctuation (for writing questions only)
- fluency (speaking questions only): speed; natural use of pauses; and reliance on filler words, repetition, and starting/stopping
- pronunciation (speaking questions only): intelligibility, individual sounds, word stress, sentence stress, and intonation