You can obtain an American scholarship with just a good TOEFL score?

Of course it’s not possible.

Yesterday, a friend of mine told me that I can obtain an American scholarship with just a good TOEFL score, say, 800…

She recommended me to do a TOEFL on the basis of her own relative who had obtained one in the past just by excelling in TOEFL. She knew that if I do one, I’d stand out amongst others.

I thanked her, and appreciated her for the attention. Yet, I quickly refuted her by saying the obvious facts that I have that would contradict her statement straightaway:

1. TOEFL stands for “Test of English as a Foreign Language”. I think it’s pretty obvious that despite being a native speaker of Bahasa Indonesia, English is no longer a foreign language for me.
2. If there still exists such a scholarship in the first place, my batch –no— the entire bunch of foreign scholars whom Singapore accepts anually would no doubt switch for an American scholarship as soon as they finished their ‘O’-levels

Honestly the point no.2 is the only one that I mentioned to her, as no.1 would sound more like a boast.

Anyway, doing a TOEFL which is 80% MCQ (Multiple-Choice Questions) could be defined as an attempt to undermine (not examine) my own English proficiency, as the TOEFL itself doesn’t examine really my composition-writing ability!

Never in my whole life, even under Damocles’ sword, would I ever do a TOEFL. I’ve done an English ‘O’-level, which consists of both Comprehension and Composition sections, and the only next thing harder than that would be an English SAT (wherein we have to write an English essay as a closing).