The day when I gave TOEFL
It was 2nd of September 2018, the day when I have to give my TOEFL exam of whose preparation I started doing 24 hours ago. From last two years I was living in France and then moved to Singapore for my internship at Cosmo Software, so English was my main language, obviously because I sucked at speaking “Baguette”. I had to give English proficiency exam before I graduate from EURECOM. My level of English was good if you ignore the grammatical error from my English. So I practiced for 24 hours, something I thought might be enough but to be honest I think one should not do this as this is not so easy even for the native speaker and after all I was not a native speaker.
Anyway, after all this I was still confident of getting 80 in TOEFL iBT which was the minimum required marks to be obtained in order to graduate. I received 93 in the practice exam for which I paid around $46 just 8 hours before my exam. With this I was bit confident and relaxed, however I still had to wake up early in the morning and it was already 2.25 a.m. The exam was suppose to start from 8.30 a.m.

After around 4 hours 30 minutes of sleep, I woke up, got ready and took the grab (cab service like Uber) to reach to the station. The driver was pretty nice man, he gave me some good advice of having breakfast. Its nice to have some healthy good conversation which releases the stress and nervousness. The taxi meter showed 7.5 SGD, I gave him the note of 10 SGD and told him to keep the change, after all he took my stress of with that small conversation.
The test center was small but well arranged, they took my passport and checked my name, gave me a locker key to keep my bags, however, they also asked me to keep my bottle outside as during the 10 minutes break I might need that and they wont allow me to open up the locker. I did as they told me and went for the screening of my body. I felt like I was going through the security check at the airport. Then they asked me for my phone number for verification which I didn’t remembered at that time, then they allowed me to go and check that number from my phone, however that was because I requested her and told that this was my temporary number and I would be leaving Singapore in a week. In the exam center they gave me a paper and two pencil for the rough work.
I started the exam, however in the first passage I was not able to concentrate as there were many other people who was doing there microphone testing and for that they have to speak, this was quite annoying especially the guy next to me was shouting like he had some kind of argument with his girlfriend. But anyway, I continued with my strategy of seeing the question and then reading the passage and this helped me to complete all the 4 reading question 2 minutes before. And after the listening question, which was not so easy than what I did in the practice exam. Anyway, after that I got the 10 minutes break for which I took the time to relax myself, do some stretching, go to washroom and drink some water.
Speaking section was a complete mess. All students around me were speaking and sometime it was even hard to hear my voice. It didn’t went as I expected, but I would say it was okay. Writing part was easy, I managed to complete the section 10 minutes before. I submitted the paper back took my belonging back and came out of the examination hall with a smiling face, probably because the cute lady at the examination center gave me a cute smile.
