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Looking to scale your Upwork agency with less manual effort?
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Articles by Vadym
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared thisI've analyzed 512+ Upwork millionaires Here's what separates winners from the rest: The anatomy of a winning setup: 1. Technical Profile Optimization (with Keyword analysis) - Bad: vibe-updating your profile with what you CAN do - Good: researching job feed for what clients ACTUALLY search for, researching competitors for their winning hook descriptions, avatars, keyword strategy 2. Auto Bidding - Bad: Applying to jobs with 5 hours average delay - Good: Using premium ai personalization tools to position in front of client eyes in <5 mins 3. Client intake management - Bad: Picking up client replies your morning time (when they already logged off) - Good: Using first reply automation to book a meeting with GigRadar CRM - Even better: Using agentic sequences in GigRadar AI CRM to qualify & book high intent clients for your time 4. Making the most of every connect spent - Bad: Never following up with past client replies - Good: Using programmable sequences in Upwork chat to periodically follow up stale conversations 5. Managing multiple profiles in an agency - Bad: Switching virtual desktops or cloud browsers (BAN RISK) - Good: Using omni channel inbox tools or real physical devices for each account Advanced tactics that work: - Cross bidding for the same jobs with multiple accounts - Raising prices for existing clients every 3 months Remember: Clients spend an average of 15 seconds per proposal and maximum of 5 minutes waiting for you to get back to them after they open the chat. I built a leaderboard of the top Upwork earners in EVERY category. Like this post and comment with your Upwork profile URL -> I will send you your Upwork rank so you can study your competition.
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared thisMy dad wrote the first check into my company. $7,000, pre-MVP. It is the only time I have ever pitched anyone. Everything after that came to us: A B2B company in our industry offered to invest at a $1.2M valuation while we were still on an MVP. Two of our own customers offered $30,000 each for equity. Several former competitors offered to send us their clients for commission. Funds started emailing. I chased none of it. The best position in any negotiation is being able to walk out of the room. People will tell you to pretend you are not raising, to make investors lean in. It works much better when you genuinely are not raising. And there is a tell most founders ignore: If you sell B2B and your own customers never offer to invest or acquire you, the product is not good enough yet. If you sell B2C and you need outside money to buy users, you need a different product or a different growth motion. Paid acquisition is a luxury early startups cannot afford. If you are running a raise, you are usually not doing the one thing that decides everything: the product. I am not a purist. GigRadar has a team and partners who hold real equity. But at $2.5M ARR with 3,000+ agencies on Upwork, there is no VC on our cap table and no board meeting on my calendar. Every dollar you raise buys something from you. Usually it is freedom. That was the reason I started in the first place.
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared thisI've rejected 1000+ proposals on Upwork as a client. Here's why most freelancers never hear back: The anatomy of proposals that get instantly deleted: 1. Copy-Paste Syndrome: - They blast the same generic template to 50 jobs - No personalization or research about my business - Usually starts with "Dear Sir/Madam" 2. The Resume Dumpers: - Send their entire life story - List every skill they've ever learned - Zero focus on my specific problem 3. The Price Warriors: - Lead with "I'll do it for less" - Try to undercut everyone else - No mention of value or results 4. The Vague Generalists: - "I can do anything you need" - No specific expertise or focus - Can't articulate their unique strength 5. The Red Flag Raisers: - Poor grammar and typos - Overpromise impossible timelines - No portfolio or proof of work What actually makes me respond: • Show you read my job post (mention specific details) • Share relevant case studies (not your whole portfolio) • Ask intelligent questions about the project • Demonstrate expertise in your niche • Keep it concise (I'm busy) The harsh truth: I delete 95% of proposals in under 10 seconds. Not because I'm mean. But because freelancers make it easy to say no. Want to stand out? Do the opposite of everything above. __ P.S. Want to scale your Upwork income from $3K to $30K a month? Comment and DM me ‘UPWORK’ and I’ll show you how to automate proposals that get a 20% reply rate!
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared thisWhy I'm posting push-ups on LinkedIn? This morning, I owed 100. My brother and I have an accountability group with one rule: every weekday, both of us publish one useful post. Miss one day: 100 push-ups. Miss twice: $100 to a children's orphanage. This week, I missed a post. So I did the push-ups. It sounds silly. But it does what motivation never can: it makes consistency expensive to abandon. “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” I think consistency beats opportunity, agency and even skill in most things worth doing. We are testing same principle at GigRadar with Content Squid Game. $5,000 prize pool. $50 penalty if someone misses their self-set posting commitment. No corporate mandate. Opt in only. In week 1, our employee LinkedIn profiles generated 100,000+ impressions combined. After 5 weeks: 1,000,000+ impressions. These accounts barely had any connections before we started. Not viral hacks. Reps. Maybe consistency is the only real edge: becoming the person who keeps promises after novelty wears off.
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared thisI found out I'd been recommending a browser I've never used, in an email I never wrote, sent under my name. That's how I learned our marketing had become AI slop - and that our product had quietly gone the same way. So I wrote to our customers myself. What we broke, what we fixed, and why I'm ending subscriptions. Full letter below.
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared this1,000 cold emails vs 1,000 Upwork bids. Same founder. Same month. Here's what actually happened: → 1,517 cold emails: 5 positive replies. → 1,000 Upwork proposals (automated with GigRadar): 111 positive replies → $80k/mo in retainers closed. The wild part? You do both to 3x each. GigRadar can supply you with the exact identities of all Upwork job posters, so you just reach them: - via email - via LinkedIn - WhatsApp Gavin Hewitson runs an email marketing agency. Email is his product. And he went on YouTube and said the quiet part out loud: Upwork outreach beats cold email. Here's why the gap is that wide, and it has nothing to do with deliverability or copy: Upwork clients are problem-aware. They already know they have a problem, they've decided to spend money on it, and they're actively looking for someone. You're not selling them on the problem, you're selling them on you. Cold email is the opposite. You're interrupting someone who wasn't thinking about the problem five seconds ago, convincing them they have one, then convincing them to solve it, then convincing them to solve it with you. Three sales in one sequence. No wonder reply rates look the way they do. Gavin's take for anyone starting out or running lean: lock in Upwork first. It's cheaper, faster, and the leads are warmer by default. Layer cold email on top once your inbound engine is already humming. Which is basically the thesis we've been betting GigRadar on for three years. Good to see someone outside the bubble run the numbers. Link to the full video in the comments 👇
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared thisAt 14 I built a fan portal for one anime movie. 1,000 registrations. 300 monthly actives. Zero dollars. I reposted content from other sites and moderated the forum myself. Twenty years, two startups with seven-figure valuations and one burnout later, I opened the web archives and realized something uncomfortable: I am doing the exact same thing today. Build the thing. Find the people it helps. Get obsessed. Build more. That is the whole loop. Business people hate this loop: 1/ "Where is your team?" I had a laptop and no marketing budget when GigRadar hit $3,500 MRR in closed beta. 2/ "Where is your round?" Thirteen months later that number was $97,000 MRR. Still no VC. 3/ "Where are your quarterly KPIs?" 3,000 agencies run their Upwork pipeline on the product. That is the KPI. What I did not expect was how much lighter the work gets when nobody is owed a board update. Obligations to bosses, partners, investors and boards never made me faster. They turned me from a builder into a nervous manager. I have a team now. Small, bootstrapped, everyone ships. But the loop has not changed since I was 14. Sometimes it takes twenty years and two exits to get back to what you were already doing for free.
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared thisI replaced our SEO agency with six agents. Each one is dumber than the person it replaced. Organic traffic 3x'd in a month. 65,200 clicks. 12M impressions. Here is the part nobody wants to do: Before this we had an agency plus contractors. Keyword research, briefs, drafts, internal links, updates to old pages. All by hand. Four to five articles a month. Industry standard results. The graph crawled. I looked at it and saw two things. Ninety percent of the work was template work: find, sort, write, check. And each person was spending six hours on what a properly equipped agent does in four minutes. So I did a time study. Not a job description. The real working day of an SEO strategist, a content manager, a copywriter, a link builder. Tab by tab, switch by switch. Then I wrote the criteria. What a good brief looks like. The exact parameters we check a draft against. What makes an internal link worth adding. That took 20 hours and it is the most boring work I have done all year. Skip it and none of this functions. Then the harness: 1/ agent runs keyword research and pushes results to a shared base 2/ agent takes one keyword, pulls Semrush and Search Console, builds the intent context 3/ agent writes the brief 4/ agent writes the draft 5/ agent handles internal linking 6/ agent updates already published articles from fresh Console data Every agent is narrow and a little stupid. Together they run like a small content agency that never sleeps. Search Console is attached. The blue line is clicks. You can see the exact week the old team rolled off and the pipeline took over. And this is the part I keep thinking about. The same framework fits any repeating role. Outbound SDR. Onboarding account manager. First line support. The ops coordinator who reconciles spreadsheets and chases people in Slack. Bookkeeping on transaction categorization. Any seat where someone earns $1-3k a month and 70% of the work follows a template. We are a small team at GigRadar. No VC. Bali and Warsaw. $2.5M ARR. I think agent shops grow over the next year the way Upwork agencies grew in 2018. The window is open mostly because everyone ran off to sell courses about building instead of building.
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Vadym Ovcharenko shared thisI remember the day I became a USD millionaire (on paper). It was 2020. I was sitting on the floor with my MacBook Pro, a 2015 model. The cold floor of a $7-a-day guesthouse, the cheapest one in Bali, that I'd just moved into after pulling out of a toxic relationship. That's when the email came in. The deal was signed. The company was now valued at $1.2M. It felt incredible. Even though my credit card balance was negative $5,000. Even though I barely had a few hundred bucks left for next week's rent, let alone my contractors. I was thrilled to the bones. In that moment I convinced myself I'd finally hustled my way into the real game. That I could finally feel secure and just focus on building. Little did I know that two months later the investor would pull out, and I'd be back to zero. Worse than zero, actually. But that's a different story. All these years later, I just checked my bank account. The balance is $326K, after we acquired 3 products. Do I feel even a little more secure than I did on that cold floor? Absolutely not. Startup folks here with 100x that in the bank: does it feel more secure? (Don't answer. I know it doesn't.) There's no security in this game. If you wanted security, you should have taken the job. "You wanted to be a businessman, son?" my dad used to tell me, skeptical. "Enjoy." Follow for more of this story
Vadym Ovcharenko replied to a comment
1mo
Nikola Nikovski we close $80,000/mo from 1000 automated proposals. Does this math make sense? 10% reply rate = 100 warm leads = 50 meetings = 15 deals ~5k each
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Vadym Ovcharenko liked thisVadym Ovcharenko liked thisWhen did you last close a contract on Upwork? Not win one. Close one. If you cannot remember, that may be why your proposals keep landing at the bottom of the client's list. From what we see in the data, Upwork seems to pay attention to whether your applications turn into finished contracts. Apply a lot and finish nothing, and your proposals can start showing up lower than everyone else's. And here is the part most freelancers get wrong. Closing is not getting hired. It is ending the contract. A job you delivered months ago but never ended still looks unfinished. Worth checking today: 1. Open your contracts list 2. Find every finished job still sitting in progress 3. End them and ask the client for feedback When did you last end a contract? This month, this year, or can't remember 👇
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Vadym Ovcharenko liked thisVadym Ovcharenko liked thisA designer told me they rank number one on Upwork for their main keyword. Still no invites. Can you guess why? Their title says "UX/UI Designer". Clients type "UI UX designer". Same words, different order, and the search treats them as two different things. Being first for a phrase nobody types is being first on an empty street. Here is the check, it takes a minute: 1. Open Upwork in an incognito window, or from a client account if you have one 2. Start typing your title in the talent search 3. If your exact phrase never shows up in the suggestions, clients are not typing it either 4. Rebuild your title around the version that does show up Ranking is not the goal. Being found is. Try it with your own title right now. Does it come up in the suggestions? Yes or no 👇
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Vadym Ovcharenko reacted on thisVadym Ovcharenko reacted on thisI spent my first 60 days on Upwork earning $0. I almost quit. The problem wasn't a lack of jobs. I was approaching Upwork like a numbers game. These were the 3 mistakes holding me back: 1. I optimized for proposals, not opportunities I tracked how many proposals I sent instead of how many were actually worth sending. Now I look at: • Client hire rate • Recent hiring activity • Project budget • Number of current proposals • Whether the project matches my niche One great opportunity is worth more than 20 random applications. 2. I treated every client the same A client with $100K spent isn't automatically a better prospect. Some high-spend clients are extremely competitive and receive dozens of proposals within minutes. Sometimes a client with $5K spent, a 90% hire rate, and a fresh job is a much better opportunity. 3. I waited too long to apply Being relevant isn't enough. Timing matters. If a strong job already has 30+ proposals, you're competing for attention. If you find the same quality of opportunity early, you have a much better chance of being seen. After changing these three things, Upwork became much more predictable. The biggest lesson: Don't ask, “How many jobs can I apply to today?” Ask: “Which opportunities are actually worth my connects?”
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Vadym Ovcharenko reacted on thisVadym Ovcharenko reacted on thisChoosing "Hourly" on Upwork is a trap if you’re actually good at what you do. Think about it: as you gain experience, a project that used to take 10 hours now takes 2. If you charge by the hour, you just gave yourself an 80% pay cut on Upwork for becoming an expert. Here is how to choose the right pricing model on the platform without burning your margins or losing clients: Hourly Contracts ⏱️ The Trap: Caps your income potential and rewards slowness. The Upside: Protects your time when a client isn't clear on what they want. Best for: Discovery phases, ongoing consulting, tech support, or clients who love "just one quick change." Fixed-Price Contracts 🔒🏷️ The Trap: Scope creep will crush your hourly rate if your milestone boundaries aren't rock-solid. The Upside: Decouples time from revenue. You get paid for the value of the outcome, not the seat time. Best for: Well-defined deliverables, standardized workflows, and high-value strategic projects. The Decision Matrix Unclear path + evolving scope → Bill Hourly Clear deliverable + high ROI → Bill Fixed-Price Stop selling hours. Start selling outcomes. Upwork freelancers: Which model makes up the bulk of your earnings?
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Vadym Ovcharenko liked thisVadym Ovcharenko liked thisI've read thousands of Upwork proposals that never got a single reply... Here's the pattern nobody wants to admit: The 5 proposal types clients skip in seconds: 1. The Clone - Same template fired at 50 jobs - Zero research on the client's business - Opens with "Dear Hiring Manager" 2. The CV Dump - Full career history in paragraph one - Every skill they've ever touched - Nothing about the client's actual problem 3. The Discounter - Leads with "I'll do it cheaper" - Competes on price, not outcome - No proof of results 4. The Everything Guy - "I can handle any task you need" - No niche, no specialty - Can't name one thing they're best at 5. The Risk Signal - Typos in the first line - Promises a 2-day delivery on a 3-week build - No portfolio, no case study, no proof What actually earns a reply: - Reference something specific from the job post - One relevant case study, not your entire portfolio - A sharp question that shows you understand the scope - Clear expertise in one lane - Short. Clients read on mobile, between meetings. The uncomfortable part: Most proposals lose in the first two lines. Not because the freelancer is bad. Because nothing in those two lines gives the client a reason to keep reading. Want more replies? Invert every point above. _ _ _ _ _ P.S. Want to scale your Upwork income from $3K to $30K a month? Comment and DM me 'UPWORK' and I'll show you how to automate proposals that get a 20% reply rate!
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Vadym Ovcharenko liked thisVadym Ovcharenko liked thisBuilding an Upwork team? Don’t start by hiring more people. Start by building a system that helps you identify the right people, test them, and make them independent. Here’s the 4-step framework I’d use: 1. Filter applications before you read them Add a simple instruction to your job post, like: "Start your proposal with SYSTEMS." Anyone who ignores it is automatically out. It’s a simple way to separate people who actually read the brief from copy-paste applications. 2. Test before you trust Don’t make a long-term commitment based on a great interview. Give your top candidates a small paid task. You’ll quickly see their: → Quality of work → Speed → Attention to detail → Communication → Ability to follow instructions 3. Create structure inside Upwork As your team grows, don’t let everyone operate independently with no ownership. Define roles, responsibilities, team leads, and budgets. Everyone should know what they own and what success looks like. 4. Make onboarding asynchronous If you explain the same task more than twice, record it. Create short SOPs and Loom videos for recurring processes. That way, new team members can find the answer themselves instead of waiting for you to jump on a call. The biggest mistake? Trying to find “unicorn” freelancers who can figure everything out themselves. You don’t need unicorns. You need good people + clear processes + consistent standards. That’s how you turn a few freelancers into a reliable Upwork team. What’s your #1 rule when hiring on Upwork?
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Vadym Ovcharenko liked thisVadym Ovcharenko liked thisI've rejected 1000+ proposals on Upwork as a client. Most of them I deleted in under 10 seconds. Five patterns show up again and again: 1. The copy-paste The same template blasted to 50 jobs. Nothing about my business. Opens with "Dear Sir/Madam" — a phrase no client has used since 2011. 2. The resume dump Your entire career history. Every skill you've ever touched. Zero sentences about the problem I actually posted. 3. The price war "I can do it cheaper." Congratulations — you've just told me the only thing you offer is being the least expensive option. 4. The vague generalist "I can do anything you need." Nobody hires anything. They hire the person who does the exact thing. 5. The red flags Typos in the first line. Impossible timelines. No proof of work. Each one is a small reason to move on, and I only need one. What actually made me reply: → Proof they read the post. One specific detail is enough. → One relevant case study. Not the whole portfolio. One. → A question that shows they understood the problem. → Narrow expertise. Specialists get read, generalists get scrolled. → Short. I was deciding, not studying. The harsh part: I didn't delete those proposals because I'm difficult. I deleted them because freelancers made saying no effortless. Every one of those five patterns handed me a reason, while someone else made the decision hard. Your job in the first two lines isn't to impress me. It's to make deleting you feel like a mistake. Which of the five did you send this week? I've sent three of them 😅
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Vadym Ovcharenko reacted on thisVadym Ovcharenko reacted on this"Upwork is dead." I hear it every week. Then I look at what actually happens inside the accounts.. A developer with zero reviews closed his first $2K contract in week three. Not luck. He picked one narrow niche, sent 15 tailored proposals a day, and named the client's tech stack in every single one. A copywriter spent two months with nothing. Then she stopped being a "content writer" and became a "SaaS onboarding email writer." Three invites the next week. Same person, same platform. A designer was blasting one generic proposal to 30 jobs a day. Zero replies. He cut it to 5 proposals with a Loom walkthrough of the client's actual site. Booked out in a month. Upwork isn't a lottery ticket. It's a language you learn!! Most people quit in week two and go hunting for the next "Upwork killer". The freelancers who win aren't the most talented. They're the ones still showing up in month three. So, dead platform, or just harder than it used to be?
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Volunteer Photographer @ Chicago Marathon 2018
JDRF International
- 1 month
Health
With brothers from DTD Gamma Beta Chapter, we volunteered as photographers and other marathon staff. Working over 10 hours in the rain, we donated over $800 to JDRF as a result.
Publications
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Music Transcription by Deep Learning with Data and "Artificial Semantic" Augmentation
International Journal of Systems Applications Engineering and Development, 11, 212-215 (2017)
In this progress paper, the previous results of the single note recognition by deep learning are presented. The several ways for data augmentation and "artificial semantic" augmentation are proposed to enhance the efficiency of deep learning approaches for monophonic and polyphonic note recognition by the increase of dimensions of training data, their lossless and lossy transformations.
Other authorsSee publication -
Code Reviewing Neural Network
"Computer Science and Computer Engineering" - IOT-2017 proceedings, p.64
Courses
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Applied Statistics
MATH564
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Big Data Technologies
CSP554
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Data Mining
CS422
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Data Preparation and Analysis
CSP571
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Deep Learning
CS577
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Machine Learning
CS584
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Mathematical Statistics
MATH563
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Public Engagement for Scientists
SCI522
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Software Project Management
CS587
Projects
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Income Regression Analysis on Census data
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See projectIn this project, we to study the relationship between personality variables and income of United States citizens. Several multiple linear regression models are applied to preprocessed data set, including a preliminary regression on all variables, a regression on manually selected variables, stepwise regression, and regression on data that was transformed using box-cox transformations. These models are compared based on their R2 and the validation of the assumed model assumptions. Additionally…
In this project, we to study the relationship between personality variables and income of United States citizens. Several multiple linear regression models are applied to preprocessed data set, including a preliminary regression on all variables, a regression on manually selected variables, stepwise regression, and regression on data that was transformed using box-cox transformations. These models are compared based on their R2 and the validation of the assumed model assumptions. Additionally, we explore the outliers in the data to make a potentially stronger model. Lastly, we give an interpretation of the final model. We study the most influential variables and present a summary of our conclusions.
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Google APK Expansion library
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See projectThe original Android APK Expansion library had sophisticated API and was abandoned years ago. In this project, I redesigned the API for the Google Play APK Expansion files and fixed some important issues that I discovered using it in a production environment. I made the library easily accessible by distributing it through jitpack.io maven repository.
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Cluise
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See projectCluise is a personal stylist and shopping assistant that applies machine learning to help users arrange their wardrobe.
Test Scores
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TOEFL® English Proficiency Test
Score: 105
The TOEFL® test, created by ETS, is an English language assessment that is often required for admission by English-speaking universities and programs around the world and is accepted by more than 9,000 institutions in over 130 countries including Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.
Languages
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English
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Russian
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Ukrainian
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