SK2 TOEFL high-score stories

Hi everyone, we're SK2 TOEFL ☺️

Applying to study abroad is a long, hard road. We want to help students who dream of studying abroad have a smoother time preparing for the TOEFL!

❤️ SK2 link to book a trial class or a course consultation: https://forms.gle/5Feye428WuHdSwyk9

🔔 100 on the second attempt: two-plus months of prep while working full time, I recommend SK2 TOEFL

Reading

Reading was actually the section I felt more confident about at first, but after doing one or two past papers I found there were tons of technical terms, spanning many subjects like astronomy and archaeology, so my first past paper was a real shock. Following Rosa's Skim and Scan method helped me a lot: I could quickly pick out the core of a sentence and skip the modifiers and so on.

Speaking

This was another section I wasn't good at, but I'm really grateful for the word bank concept. David had us practice expanding our word banks, which helped fix the problem of not being able to think of examples. That was my biggest problem at the time, and I gradually started collecting examples from my own life experiences to add to my word bank. When practicing speaking, I kept listening to David's recordings and imitating their intonation, pauses and transitions. Thanks to that practice, my fluency improved a lot, and varying my pitch made my speaking sound clearer.

🔔 85⮕99, up 14 points: five months of prep, thanks to SK2 TOEFL for saving me time

English is my worst subject. I was far behind my peers, and I only got into university because admission was based on my total score on the Advanced Subjects Test. But because of my major and my love of exploring new things, I always dreamed of studying abroad, and the US is a powerhouse in biomedicine, so I started preparing for the TOEFL in the hope of applying to related graduate programs in the US.

In 2022 I was going on an exchange, and I needed a certain score to get a scholarship, so I took the TOEFL four times. My school's international office accepted my MyBest score at the time, but honestly, none of those four scores were good, and none met the requirements for graduate programs abroad. After a year of using English every day as an exchange student, I thought I must have improved, so I took the TOEFL again in September 2023. Apart from speaking (17 -> 22), nothing changed much. Honestly I was pretty discouraged then; it even delayed my plans to apply to grad school, and I lost a lot of confidence. Later, in 2024, I still really wanted to make my dream of studying abroad come true, and after all my earlier setbacks with the TOEFL, I decided to sign up for the SK2 TOEFL intensive course. Early this year I finally got a pretty good score, with big improvement in writing. Thank you, SK2 TOEFL!

If you're like me and keep going back and forth on whether to sign up for a prep school, you can decide based on your personality or your starting level of English. Preparing on my own, I took the test five times without a good result. I improved, but I was still far from my goal, and I was very discouraged and doubted myself. After joining SK2, though, the improvement, especially in writing, means I don't regret signing up at all (and it's why I'm willing to write this post now). My English foundation was weak, and sometimes a goal that's too far away feels unreal (in high school I only scored in the 400s on the TOEIC, I got just 12 on the GSAT, and I once scored a total of 71 on the TOEFL), so when preparing on my own I often couldn't find my blind spots and wasn't sure how to improve.

SK2 TOEFL will keep sharing its high-score stories series

Stay tuned for more ❤️