I have been in contact with a group of people who have one or more attempts in CS exam. Some of them have already taken TOEFL and managed to pass with decent scores but failed to pass SEP in CS!!! Another shocking story is that someone passed SEP twice with med-high performance and failed ICE with one star. On the third attempt, that SAME person passed ICE with high performance and failed SEP. If this was a standardized test, one should at least not fail a different component after passing it twice. I have never heard someone loses language proficiency with time! Please correct me if I’m wrong. Other people have failed CIS twice and were able to pass english with high performance. In my humble opinion, the new exclusion criteria is just discriminatory and can not be applied to all! Something has to change. The exam has already been unfair to people with different SPs because at the end they’re also humans who might be in a different mood/judgment everytime.
There is nothing like toefl passing score. Every University sets different bars for eligible scores. Also ecfmg hasnt announced their criteria regarding this. But i dont think they will keep very loose criteria.
Institutions like Cleveland Clinic require minimum 107 with speaking score 26. I am sure that many people who passed SEP wouldn’t be able to score 107+ on toefl.
Many people just cram everything for CS and stick to those particular words whereas there is more ‘new’ information in toefl which would expose one to unfamiliar words. Also, if you speak slowly (to utilise time for thinking ahead) you will be fine with SEP, but not with toefl.