Unpopular Opinions on Test Failure Reasons | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about why people fail the GRE, TOEFL, or IELTS?
Answer:
Here are several genuinely unpopular (often downvoted or dismissed) opinions commonly expressed in test-prep communities, among tutors, and on forums like Reddit (r/GRE, r/IELTS), Quora, and GradCafe. These are deliberately contrarian takes that many people don’t want to hear:
- Most failures aren’t because of “bad luck” or “tricky questions”—they’re because the test-taker simply hasn’t reached the required academic English or reasoning level yet, and no amount of “strategy” will fully compensate for that gap.
- Many international students spend years and thousands of dollars on prep courses while still using broken English in daily life (WeChat, Discord, native-language subtitles, etc.). The test accurately detects that low immersion and punishes it—no coaching hack fixes genuine lack of fluency.
- Complaining that the GRE Verbal or TOEFL/IELTS is “unfair to non-native speakers” is often a coping mechanism. The exams are supposed to predict success in English-medium graduate programs; if you can’t handle 300-level academic vocabulary or write a coherent 300-word essay under time pressure, you will struggle in seminars and with research papers anyway.
- A huge percentage of low scorers treat these tests like high-school entrance exams: cramming vocabulary lists and templates for 2–3 months. That works for some domestic standardized tests but fails spectacularly here because the skills (critical reading, evidence-based writing, quantitative reasoning) take years, not months, to build if you’re starting from a weak base.
- Score cancellation and endless retakes are sometimes a form of learned helplessness. After the 3rd or 4th attempt with almost identical scores, the honest answer is usually “this person may not be grad-school material at an English-speaking university right now,” not “one more template/course will do it.”
- Private tutoring and “guaranteed 320+/110+” courses prey on desperation. Many students who buy them would have gotten the same or better scores just by reading difficult English material daily for a year instead of paying someone to drill shortcuts that ETS/raters now recognize and penalize.
- Some nationalities/cultures systematically underperform because their education systems reward rote memorization over actual argument construction and evidence evaluation—skills the GRE/TOEFL/IELTS explicitly test. Blaming the test instead of the prior 12–15 years of education is convenient but inaccurate.
- High practice scores that crash on test day are rarely “anxiety.” They’re almost always inflated by repeated exposure to the exact same question types in a handful of popular prep books and lack of strict timed practice with new material—i.e., overconfidence, not nerves.
- Parents and society pushing 21-year-olds who barely passed high-school English into U.S./UK/Australian master’s programs “for the ranking” set them up for humiliation on these exams and often for academic probation later.
These opinions tend to get strong negative reactions because they shift blame from the test (or from “unfair Western standards”) back onto the candidate’s actual preparation, language environment, and sometimes prior education quality—things people have more control over than they like to admit.
References:
- Various threads on Reddit r/GRE, r/IELTS, r/TOEFL (2019–2025)
- GradCafe forums, “GRE Verbal is impossible for non-natives” discussions
- Quora answers under “Why do so many Indian/Chinese students struggle with GRE Verbal?” (highly upvoted but controversial answers)