Does naming a classmate help your Academic Discussion score?

Prep advice routinely tells test-takers to “engage with the other students”. In these answers, fewer than half do it by name. Among answers scoring 28 or more, 50.0% name a classmate (n = 424); among answers scoring 24 or less, 35.1% do (n = 783).

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<figure style="margin:0;max-width:880px">
  <img src="https://lingoleap.ai/research/charts/academic-discussion-classmates.svg" alt="Score by classmates named" width="880" height="540" style="max-width:100%;height:auto" loading="lazy">
  <figcaption>Source: <a href="https://lingoleap.ai/research/academic-discussion-classmates">LingoLeap, Does Naming a Classmate Help on TOEFL Academic Discussion?</a></figcaption>
</figure>

/research/charts/academic-discussion-classmates.svg

If naming a classmate mattered only because it shows you are joining the discussion, the gap should sit in Relevance & Contribution to Discussion alone. It does not: Relevance and Clarity move by about the same amount, and Language Use by a little less. That fits the reading that writers who name classmates are somewhat stronger writers overall, not that the name itself is being rewarded.

Sample

Every non-legacy TOEFL Academic Discussion task in LingoLeap's sample library, and the first 20 published sample answers for each: 3,729 sample pages. After exclusions, 3,692 answers across 1,467 tasks (mean score 25.17, SD 2.42; median length 154 words). These are real learner answers that LingoLeap publishes as samples, not every answer ever submitted.

Period

Retrieved 26 Sep 2026. The endpoint does not expose when an answer was written, so submission dates are not recorded.

Source

LingoLeap's public sample endpoint (the same data the sample pages show), read at no more than two requests a second: 3,723 of 3,729 pages returned a record.

How scores were produced

LingoLeap's AI estimate on the 0-30 scale and three rubric sub-scores on 0-5 (Relevance and Contribution to Discussion; Clarity and Elaboration of Viewpoint; Language Use and Grammar), parsed from the grader's report. Not ETS scores, and not on the 1-6 band scale ETS reports for tests from 21 January 2026.

Exclusions

13 records with no answer text and 8 grader failures (overall 0 with every sub-score 0). Any group smaller than 30 answers is not reported.

Limitations

Observational: naming a classmate may mark a writer who engages with the discussion rather than raise a score by itself. Published samples average 25.2 of 30, a stronger-than-typical group. LingoLeap AI scores, not ETS.

Privacy

Only aggregates are published. No answer text, names, or individual scores appear on this page or in the download.

Who counts as a classmate

The two student posts in each prompt, read from the prompt itself. 340 answers whose prompt did not carry two named students are left out of this study, leaving 3,352.

1. 1

   Not ETS

   The scores come from LingoLeap's AI grader. Nothing here tests how ETS's raters treat references to classmates.

2. 2

   Not causal

   Nobody was assigned to name a classmate. Writers who name classmates may differ in other ways the length and same-prompt checks do not capture.

3. 3

   Naming is not engaging

   The study detects a name, not whether the answer responds to that student's argument. A name dropped into an unrelated answer is not what was measured.

4. 4

   Not every learner

   The answers are LingoLeap's published samples, which average 25.2 of 30. The share naming a classmate may differ among all test-takers.