DET Speaking Scoring

Speaking is graded on the four writing criteria plus fluency and pronunciation. Accent is explicitly not penalised; word stress, pausing and being easy to understand are. That distinction is the most misunderstood thing about the DET speaking score.

The Scale

Every DET number — the overall score and all eight subscores — sits on the same 10 to 160 scale in steps of five. Your overall score is the average of the four individual subscores, so each of Reading, Listening, Writing and Speaking carries a quarter of the total.

DET score	CEFR level	User	What it means in practice
10-55	A1 / A2	Basic user	Can handle very simple, predictable exchanges. Below the level almost any degree programme asks for.
60-95	B1	Independent user	Can deal with familiar matters and produce connected text on everyday topics. Enough for some foundation and pathway programmes.
100-125	B2	Independent user	Can follow a technical discussion in their field and argue a position. The band most undergraduate admissions sit in.
130-150	C1	Proficient user	Can use English flexibly for academic and professional purposes. What competitive and postgraduate programmes ask for.
155-160	C2	Proficient user	Can handle anything read or heard with ease and express fine shades of meaning. Rare, and above what any institution requires.

The integrated subscores are simple averages, rounded to the nearest five: Literacy is Reading and Writing, Comprehension is Reading and Listening, Conversation is Speaking and Listening, Production is Speaking and Writing. Nothing new is measured to produce them.

The Six Criteria

Criterion	What is inside it
Content	Task achievement and relevance, appropriacy of style, development, and the effect on the listener.
Discourse coherence	Clarity, cohesion, and whether the order of ideas makes sense to someone hearing it once.
Fluency	Rate of speech, chunking (whether pauses fall at clause boundaries), and how much you rely on fillers, restarts and repetition.
Grammar	Grammatical complexity and accuracy. Punctuation does not apply.
Lexis	Diversity, sophistication, word choice and word formation. Spelling does not apply.
Pronunciation	Intelligibility, individual sounds, word stress, sentence stress and intonation. All standard varieties of English are accepted.

There is no ideal speaking speed. What is measured is whether your rate is comfortable to listen to and whether your pauses land in natural places — between clauses rather than in the middle of a phrase.

The Six Score Bands

One column per criterion, condensed from the official scoring guide.

Score	Content	Coherence	Fluency	Grammar	Lexis	Pronunciation
155-160	Fully achieves the task; complex ideas, fully developed.	Coherent and cohesive; extremely easy to follow.	Natural and highly fluent; pauses are natural.	A very wide range; only expert-speaker slips.	Precise, nuanced, idiomatic.	Clear throughout; stress and intonation appropriate.
130-150	Achieves the task; relevant and well-developed.	Coherent and cohesive; very easy to follow.	Mostly natural and fluent.	A wide range; errors are rare.	Accurate and appropriate, broad range.	Mostly clear; any inaccuracy does not affect understanding.
100-125	Mostly achieves the task; developed and relevant.	Mostly coherent; no clarification needed.	Reasonably fluent; some longer pauses that do not obscure meaning.	A range of structures; errors usually do not block communication.	Generally accurate.	Mostly clear; pronunciation may occasionally affect understanding.
60-95	Partially achieves the task; development limited to familiar topics.	Coherence lapses at times; a listener may need clarification.	Long or unnatural pauses that can affect understanding.	A limited range; some errors interfere.	Clear but limited, and sometimes inaccurate.	Some words unclear; stress and intonation sometimes missing.
30-55	Minimally achieves the task; short or partly off-topic.	Repetitive and only somewhat coherent.	Not fluent; very slow or heavily broken.	Basic structures with frequent errors.	Limited and often inaccurate.	Often unclear; unnatural stress.
10-25	Does not achieve the task; off-topic or very short.	Not easy to follow at all.	Long unnatural pauses and repetition; coherence is lost.	Only basic structures; very frequent errors.	Very limited and inaccurate.	Often unintelligible; intonation incorrect or missing.

How Fluency Is Really Measured

Fluency is not speed. Three separate things are being watched, and only one of them has anything to do with how fast you talk.

Component	What raises it	What lowers it
Speed	A rate a listener can follow comfortably. There is no target words-per-minute.	Rushing to fit an answer into the clock, or a rate so slow the listener loses the thread.
Chunking	Pausing at the end of clauses and phrases, and using a pause for emphasis.	Pausing mid-phrase while you retrieve a word. This is the single most common fluency problem.
Breakdowns and repairs	Occasional natural fillers and self-correction.	Frequent restarts, repeated words, and long silences. Some is normal; a lot is not.

A useful self-test: record a 90-second answer and count every silence longer than two seconds. That count, more than anything else on the recording, is your fluency score.

Accent, Stress and Intelligibility

Duolingo states that all varieties of standard English pronunciation are acceptable. What is graded is whether you can be understood, and whether stress falls where English puts it.

Word stress is scored directly. baNAna is right; banaNA is not. Long academic words are where this is lost most often.
Sentence stress matters for contrast and emphasis: "CHInese or JApanese?"
Intonation carries meaning — falling at the end of a list, rising on a genuine question.
Individual sounds only cost points when they make you hard to follow, not when they mark you as a speaker of another first language.

What Actually Raises a Speaking Band

Start immediately. The recording begins when you click. Silence in the first three seconds costs fluency and buys nothing.
Use the whole clock on the long tasks. Ninety seconds and three minutes are given for a reason; a short answer caps Content.
Never go silent on a missing word. Describe it instead. An imprecise phrase costs a little Lexis; a five-second gap costs Fluency and Coherence together.
Signpost out loud. "There are two reasons. First… The second thing is…" is the cheapest coherence available.
Fix stress on the words you actually use. A short list of your own academic vocabulary, checked in a dictionary, moves Pronunciation faster than accent work.

Model answers for all four speaking tasks, written the way they would be spoken, are on the DET Speaking samples page.

DET, IELTS and TOEFL

Duolingo publishes its own concordance with IELTS and TOEFL iBT, and this is the table admissions offices use when they translate an existing requirement into a DET minimum.

DET	IELTS band	TOEFL iBT
160	8.5-9	120
155	8	119
150	8	117-118
145	7.5	113-116
140	7.5	109-112
135	7	104-108
130	7	98-103
125	6.5	93-97
120	6.5	87-92
115	6	82-86
110	6	76-81
105	6	70-75
100	5.5	65-69
95	5.5	59-64
90	5	53-58
85	5	47-52
80	5	41-46
75	4.5	35-40
70	4.5	30-34
65	4.5	24-29
10-60	0-4	0-23

Kirill O'Nayd, Duolingo English Test expert

Written by Kirill O'Nayd

English test expert and educator at TestSucceed, where he builds the Duolingo English Test practice tasks and mock tests and has spent years taking apart how computer-adaptive, AI-graded exams award their points. See all TestSucceed preparation materials.