Top universities caught using DUOLINGO to screen foreign students

The Home Office has started procurement for an £816million contract to provide English language testing for visa and immigration decisions, overhauling digital screening potential.

Duolingo is not on the list of approved providers for this scheme, although universities are able to set their own English language assessments at their discretion.

Duolingo’s hour-long timed test involve identifying real words from fictitious ones, describing a photograph of a scene, interactive listening and interactive writing - taken by four million people each year.

The platform is better known for its language-learning app, whose owl mascot encourages learners to achieve daily goals - with bitesize learning modules to engage those with shorter attention spans.

The Duolingo English Test (DET) is not yet approved by the government, having irked those behind more established tests despite assuring stringent anti-cheating measures.

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS), managed by the British Council and Cambridge University Press and Assessment, is more commonly implemented to screen foreign students.

Universities across the UK were found to be taking inconsistent approaches to language proficiency testing for admissions, with a study conducted by the British Council and Cambridge University Press and Assessment, plus researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Dundee.

It said: “Concerns are particularly pronounced regarding students admitted through newer online tests, with many staff members reporting that these students often struggle with the academic and communicative demands of their courses.

“Data from this study highlight concerns about the preparedness of students admitted through less traditional tests.

"Many institutions report that these students often face significant challenges in adjusting to the academic environment, particularly in terms of language proficiency and academic skills".

One respondent said students who came with the Duolingo award “were not in practice equipped to deal with higher education life and study”.

Rogelio Alvarez Mury, general manager of DET, disputed the academic research, claiming it is based on perceptions rather than student outcomes, and that nine out of ten universities surveyed did not use the DET.

He said: "More than 6,000 institutions worldwide rely on the DET, including national security agencies, more than 60 universities in the UK and the entire Ivy League in the US.

"The DET’s academic rigour, robust, award-winning test-security innovations, and highly trained human-review processes, are supported by a strong body of research and student-outcome data.”

Some test sitters have criticised the artificial intelligence scoring element of the DET, arguing that it appears to penalise accents, whilst others report missing the required score due to technical issues.

Would-be students can practise test materials free on the Duolingo website but must pay to sit the test, with cheating being difficult to eliminate both online and in person.

Exam fraud for in-person tests includes papers being leaked or candidates paying others to take the assessment for them.

Between August 2023 and September 2025, thousands of people received incorrect test scores from IELTS, which was subsequently blamed on “a technical issue” by the organisation.

Last December, Duolingo introduced a mandatory “ear scan” requirement for test-takers, where users must use their smartphone to record a close-up 360-degree video before the exam begins to prove they are not wearing earphones or earbuds.

They must also sit exams while being filmed by two cameras, to ensure no one else is in the room and their eye movements and key strokes are monitored by AI, and reviewed by a human proctor.