PTE Exam Scoring: Know How PTE Academic Exam is Evaluated

Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) report mentions an individual's:

• Overall Score,
• Communicative Skills Scores, and 
• Enabling Skills Scores.

Overall Score

It is based on a candidate's performance on all the test items. A test comprises 70 to 91 questions, which are of 20 different types. Marks scored for each question contributes towards the Overall Score of a candidate.

The score range for the Overall Score is 10 to 90 points.

Communicative Skills Scores

PTE Academic assesses a candidate's communicative skills, such as:

• Speaking,
• Listening,
• Reading, and
• Writing

Some questions in the exam are designed to test these sub-skills. Some integrated skills questions may test two of these skills.

The score range of Communicative Skills Scores is 10 to 90 points.

Enabling Skills Scores

The exam also assesses the following skills in candidates:

• Grammar: refers to the correct use of word forms and order at the sentence level.
• Oral Fluency: refers to the pace, smoothness, and effortlessness of speech.
• Pronunciation: refers to speech sounds that are easily understandable by other people who use English regularly.
• Spelling: Candidates are expected to use one spelling convention consistently throughout the copy.
• Vocabulary: Lexical range of the candidate and appropriate choice of words are evaluated here.
• Writing Discourse: Writing structure, coherence, logical development, and the range of linguistic resources used to express the precise meaning correctly in the written text is assessed here.

They are based on the performance of the candidate on questions designed to test these specific skills.

The score range of Enabling Skills Scores is 10 to 90 points.

Two types of PTE Academic Scoring

Some of the questions in the exam have either correct or incorrect answers. In this case, correct response wins you 1 point while an incorrect response scores you 0 points. These include:

• Answer Short Question in the Speaking & Writing section,
• Multiple-Choice, Choose Single Answer type questions in the Reading section, and
• Highlight Correct Summary, Multiple-Choice, Choose Single Answer and Select Missing Word type questions in the Listening section.

But some other questions allow you to score partial credit if you give partially correct answers. These include:

• Read Aloud, Repeat Sentence, Describe Image, Re-tell Lecture, Summarize Written Text and Write Essay type questions in the Speaking & Writing section,
• Multiple-Choice, Choose Multiple Answers, Re-order Paragraphs, Reading: Fill in the Blanks and Reading and Writing: Fill in the Blanks type questions in the Reading section, and
• Summarize Spoken Text, Multiple-Choice, Choose Multiple Answers, Fill in the Blanks, Highlight Incorrect Words and Write from Dictation type questions in the Listening section.

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