MBA Center Global 
Most students applying to schools in the US (and now a lot of programs in Europe and Asia too) end up needing the TOEFL at some point, and the first thing almost everyone gets wrong is treating it like a grammar test. It isn't really. There's Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing, and the actual passages and lectures are pulled from genuine university-level material — a biology lecture here, an art history reading there — so if you've only ever studied "test English" and not the kind of English a professor actually uses in a seminar, the content itself can throw you off before the language even becomes the issue.
Worth knowing before anything else: ETS changed the test in a real way starting January 2026. Reading and Listening are now multistage adaptive, meaning the difficulty adjusts as you go based on how you're doing, and scores are now reported on a new 1–6 band scale (in half-point steps) alongside the older familiar 0–120 scale. ETS is running both scales side by side for about two years so universities have time to catch up, but if you're prepping now, it's worth checking which scale your target schools are actually asking for before you fixate on a number.
the format trips people up more than the language does
It's not unusual for genuinely fluent English speakers – people who have lived abroad for years, no accent to speak of – to score under their target the first time around, and it is almost never a fluency problem. More often it is that they have not practiced the Speaking section's actual format. A couple of the tasks ask you to listen to a short clip, read a short passage, and combine both into a single spoken answer with very little prep time. Most people just have not done it before, and it shows.
Writing is done entirely on a keyboard. Sounds like a small thing until you're mid-essay and realise you type noticeably slower than you write by hand, which eats into time you were counting on. Worth practicing typed responses specifically, not just outlining essays on paper and assuming it'll transfer.
Listening also mixes accents — American mostly, but British and Australian speakers show up too, and if your ear has mostly been trained on one of those, the others take some adjusting to, more than people expect going in.
what's actually worth doing beforehand
Timed practice, properly timed, is probably the single biggest thing. Not "I'll aim for roughly 20 minutes," an actual timer running while you do a full section, because the real test won't give extra minutes when you're halfway through a thought and the clock runs out anyway.
For speaking, record yourself and actually play it back. Almost nobody wants to do this and almost everyone who does it finds something useful – too many filler words, answers that don't really land anywhere, running out of things to say before time's up.
And leave yourself a retake buffer when you're scheduling. Scores take a little while to come through officially, so booking the test 2 to 3 months before your earliest deadline (rather than right up against it) means a second attempt is still realistically possible if the first one doesn't go how you wanted. Current, official details on scoring and format are always worth double-checking directly on ETS's TOEFL site before you sit down to study, since this is one of those tests that does change from time to time.
None of this requires some huge overhaul of your English. Most of the gap between a first attempt and a target score comes from not knowing what the test is actually asking of you in each section – once that's clear, the rest tends to follow.
