How Do Raters Judge the Speaking Section of the TOEFL?

For the Speaking section of the TOEFL iBT, you will be asked to provide a spoken response to each of six different items. Each of your responses will be recorded and will be saved to a secure database. Then the responses will be played back and analyzed by trained raters who will assign ratings to them. When raters listen to your responses, they will be evaluating your speech along a number of different dimensions. These include Delivery, Language Use, and Topic Development, which are referenced in a specific scoring rubric that raters use while listening to responses. The TOEFL iBT website has a PDF of the official scoring rubric.