About DET Mock Tests
The most faithful Duolingo English Test practice there is. We rebuilt the real exam — its question types, its adaptive engine, its timing and its one-hour flow — so practising here feels like the day itself.
- Built to mirror the real DET, task for task
- A real adaptive engine — difficulty moves with your answers
- AI-scored writing and speaking, with feedback on every response
The closest thing to the real exam
This is the one thing we set out to be, and the thing we are proudest of: the most accurate, most realistic Duolingo English Test practice available anywhere outside the official test. We are not a quiz with a number bolted on the end. We rebuilt the real exam.
Every question type is the real one, in the real July-2025 format. The difficulty adapts to your answers with a genuine item-response engine — the same kind the real test uses — not a fixed set of questions. The timing, the one-hour flow, the order the sections come in, the way each task looks and behaves on screen: all of it is built to match, so that when you sit the real thing, nothing is a surprise. It feels like something you have already done.
We do not know of another independent platform that has gone this far to reproduce the actual experience of the exam — most stop at a word count and a percentage. That fidelity is the whole point of this project, because a practice test that does not feel like the real test is not practice, it is a different test wearing the same name.
And the score means something
Because the DET is adaptive and reports eight subscores, a real practice score has to be too. Ours is: a genuine adaptive engine underneath, the same eight subscores on top, and a report that tells you which skill is costing you points rather than just how many you got right — with every written and spoken answer graded against a rubric.
How the scoring actually works
Underneath the practice tests is an item-response model rather than a mark scheme. Every question in the bank has an estimated difficulty. As you answer, the engine maintains a running estimate of your ability and a measure of how uncertain that estimate is, and it chooses each next question to be the one that will reduce the uncertainty most.
Three consequences follow, and they are the reasons it behaves like the real test:
- Difficulty tracks you. Answer well and the questions get harder. That is feedback, not punishment.
- Not all correct answers are worth the same. A hard item answered correctly moves the estimate further than an easy one, because it is stronger evidence.
- The test can stop when it is confident. Precision, not question count, is what the engine is working towards.
Writing and speaking cannot be scored this way, because there is no key to compare against. Those responses are graded against a rubric across several dimensions — including whether the response actually addresses the prompt — and the rubric score is fed back into the same ability estimate. Speaking is transcribed first, so the words you said are what gets graded.
What we cannot tell you
It is easy to write a page like this that only lists strengths. These are the honest limits, and you should weigh them before trusting any number we give you.
Do this
- Find which of your four skills is weakest, which is the single most useful thing a practice test can do.
- Track whether that skill is moving across several sittings.
- Tell you how a task is scored and what specifically went wrong in your response.
- Show you how uncertain the estimate is, rather than hiding it behind a single number.
- Give you an hour under realistic timers, which is a skill in itself.
Not this
- Predict your official Duolingo English Test score. Nobody can, and platforms that claim to are guessing.
- Produce a result any institution will accept. These are practice scores with no standing.
- Replicate the official test exactly — the real item bank and scoring model are not public.
- Grade writing and speaking as reliably as a trained human rater. Automated grading has real variance.
- Tell you whether you are ready. That depends on a requirement only you can look up.
The grading engine has been tuned against a set of reference responses we hand-labelled, including deliberately adversarial ones — off-topic essays, memorised answers, fluent but empty responses. Score error against those references is in the region of eight points, which is roughly one and a half increments of the DET scale. That is good enough to locate a weakness and far too coarse to treat as a prediction.
Where our facts come from
Everything this site states about the official test comes from Duolingo's own published material. Where a claim is our own observation, an estimate, or true only of our engine, the sentence says so.
| Claim | Source |
|---|---|
| Score scale of 10 to 160, in increments of 5 | Duolingo published scoring documentation |
| Eight subscores; individual scores average to the overall; integrated scores are the average of two individual ones | Duolingo published scoring documentation |
| CEFR alignment (A1–A2 10–55, B1 60–95, B2 100–125, C1 130–150, C2 155–160) | Duolingo CEFR alignment publication |
| Test fee of $70 USD, results in 2 days, validity of 2 years | Duolingo test-taker information |
| Test process: 5 minutes setup and id verification; 45 minutes scored assessment; 10 minutes writing and speaking samples | Duolingo published test format |
| Accepted by 6,500+ institutions | Duolingo institutions directory |
| Proctoring and test-security measures | Duolingo test security documentation |
| IELTS and TOEFL comparisons | Duolingo published comparison tables, presented as bands because neither test discriminates to single points |
| Task difficulty estimates and our score estimates | Ours. Generated by our engine and calibrated against the CEFR alignment above |
Our relationship with Duolingo
There is not one. DET Mock Tests is an independent practice platform, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Duolingo, Inc. "Duolingo" and "Duolingo English Test" are trademarks of Duolingo, Inc., used here only to describe what these practice tests prepare you for.
We have no access to the official item bank, the official scoring model, or any test taker's official results. Everything here is built from the publicly documented format and our own item bank.
What we store
- Audio is never stored. Speaking responses are streamed to a transcription service, transcribed, and discarded. The transcript is what gets graded and what you see in your report.
- You can practise without an account. Signing in exists so your history persists and so the engine can avoid repeating questions across sittings.
- Your data is yours. Attempts and responses are scoped to your account and are not visible to other users.
The full detail is in the privacy policy. If something there is unclear, tell us — a privacy policy nobody can understand is not doing its job.
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