TOEFL Writing: Write for an Academic Discussion
A professor poses a question and two students have replied. You add your own contribution. It is the one writing task carried over from the previous TOEFL, and it is still most often failed the same way: by writing an essay that could have been written without reading the thread.
It is marked as a contribution
- Engage with what a named student said. Agree, disagree, or qualify — by name.
- State your own position clearly.
- Support it with one concrete example. One developed example beats three mentioned ones.
- Extend the conversation — raise the thing neither student considered.
A response that states a view and defends it in general terms reads as though you did not read the posts. The task is a discussion, and the mark reflects whether you joined one.
What the examiner is looking at
- Relevance to the professor's actual question, which is often narrower than the topic.
- Engagement with the existing posts.
- Development — a reason explained rather than asserted.
- Language — range and accuracy, as always, but secondary to the above.
Disagreeing is safe and often produces the stronger contribution, because it forces you to say why — which is the development the task rewards.
Write for an Academic Discussion — FAQs
2 questions
A developed contribution of a short paragraph or two. This task is not scored on word count.
No. Agreeing, disagreeing or qualifying all work, as long as you engage with what they wrote.
More writing question types
Sources
Written from the test board's own published material and checked on 1 October 2026.