What score would an English speaker as a first language score on the TOEFL exam?

The question, to me, is how the TOEFL grading takes into account current English slang and common usage, and how much does it follow the grammar rules that we learned and forgot 40 years ago.\

For example, it is common to hear gonna and wanna normal every day speech (for ‘going to’ and ‘want to’.) Those words are universally understood in the US and (my guess) around the world.

But the ‘official’ rules would say going to and want to are proper usage and spelling, despite the fact that 90% of all English speakers would find that stilted.

So what’s the baseline for scoring? Does the test reflect some theoretical and obsolete way of speaking and writing, or does it reflect common usage?

In my opinion TOEFL is the test most closely designed to match real life’s speech. That doesn’t say much about how close it is to every day speech though. “Closely designed” in the sense that the topics are close to everyday life and there are some references to the culture.

I think those tests are a more rigid version of the “no txtspeech” policy of Fluther. After all they are designed to judge whether you are able to use English from a formal to semi-formal setting They are requirements for jobs anyway. Sometimes the tests just make me cringe thinking “who the hell speaks like that?”

They would have massive problems with basic spelling, like confusing ‘their’ and ‘there’, or writing ‘would of’ instead of ‘would have’.
Or using phrases like ‘begging the question’ instead of the correct ‘raising the question’.

Often foreign students of English speak and write it better than native speakers. Also, there is such a wide range of ability in native English speakers that I wouldn’t judge the difficulty of the test based on an individual performance.

There are practice books available that you can get from the library if you want an idea of the test.

Thanks all. Still looking for an average score for those who are native speakers of English.