Perfect TOEFL reading/writing/listening scores but low speaking score due to stutter. How will this affect PhD admissions?

Question

I am fairly comfortable with English as a second language and have been studying at schools with English as the primary language for the last 9 years. I also have multiple semesters worth of experience TA'ing for CS courses in English (conducting lab sessions, giving short lectures etc.).

I recently took TOEFL and obtained scores around 28-29 for reading, writing, and listening sections.

However, I received a 17 in the speaking section. Since I can normally speak English comfortably in casual and academic settings, I believe this low result was due to the automatic grader interpreting my stutter as a sign of inadequacy.

How much would a low grade in the speaking section of TOEFL affect my overall profile when applying for a CS PhD in the US?

Thanks for any answers in advance.

Answer 1

As in a comment by @GoodDeeds: in my U.S. R1 large state univ, my math dept has a cut-off of 23 for the spoken part of the TOEFL (=test of English as a foreign language), regardless of the rest of the application. Sometimes a 22 can make the cut, if faculty advocate for the applicant. Most of our grad students are supported as TAs (teaching assistants).

Although I've been involved in our grad admissions for a long time, I do not recall ever seeing a claim that a low speaking TOEFL score was due to a stutter or similar. I don't think we have any system in place for detecting such a claim, either! ... so an application with such a TOEFL score might not get read closely enough for any admissions people to see the explanation, etc.

To have admissions people think about this, you'll need to make a prominent point of it in a cover letter or elsewhere. And/or a direct communication with the Director of Grad Studies in the dept you're applying to, alerting them to the issue.

Answer 2

I was in a very similar situation, except that it was the IELTS rather than the TOEFL for me, and that I wanted to apply to PhD programmes in the UK, rather than the US. It all worked out fine.

The role of a language test in PhD admissions is, in my experience, a binary measure. An applicant needs to be sufficiently proficient to be considered; but you cannot outcompete another candidate by being better in the language. It also seems to be rather common to handle the language certification towards the end of the process by making a conditional offer that needs a sufficiently good language test to be converted into an unconditional offer.

Thus, I believe that if your application material is otherwise strong, you can expect a conditional offer with the requirement to submit a better language certificate. At that point, you get in touch with the department and talk them into waving the requirement (actually talking rather than emailing probably works better, as they'll see that you can actually speak English and just stutter). That's how I did it.

Answer 3

Given your past experience (as a TA), I'd guess it won't matter at all. Presumably you have developed some coping/compensation strategies to effectively deal with it.

Perhaps you should indicate in a cover letter that you stutter, that it probably negatively affects an oral test score, and that you are happy to demonstrate that IRL you can communicate more effectively than the test indicates.

The US is also pretty good about not discriminating against people with such issues. A lot of that is enshrined in law. See this for example.

But long term anything you can do to become an effective speaker will serve your career interests. But that is true of everyone.