PTE Score: Know How the PTE-A Is Scored & Get Started With Mock Tests

 If you want to take the PTE-Academic Exam, you need first to understand how it is scored. The PTE is different from typical English-language tests. It uses integrated scoring.

Getting the perfect PTE score is as much a function of proper understanding of the scoring pattern, as it of flawless performance.

Experts recommend that even before taking a PTE Mock Test, you should first know in detail about how your PTE Test is scored.

In this blog, we will address the scoring part of the test.

Understanding Your PTE Score: How the PTE-Academic Is Scored

All questions in the PTE Academic Exam are scored using an automated scoring method (Artificial Intelligence-scoring). 

There are two types of questions, depending on how they are scored:

1. Questions based on correctness. (Correct or incorrect)
2. Questions based on correctness, response quality and formal aspects. (Partial credit)

The quality of the response is based on something called 'Enabling Skills'. We've explained that in details later in this blog.

Formal Aspects indicate the form of the response. For instance, in some question types, it may be about whether your answer is within the given word limits.

There are three types of scores reflected in the above scorecard:

• Overall Score
• Communicative Skills Score
• Enabling Skills Score

The Overall Score is a combination of Communicative and Enabling Skills Scores.

 

What are Communicative and Enabling Skills?

Communicative Skills

Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking are the four Communicative skills.

The PTE exam consists of questions that assess your integrated skills (reading and writing, speaking and listening, speaking and writing skills) through four different sections- listening, speaking, writing and listening. 

Enabling Skills

These skills are a measure of your language ability. Pearson reports these skills to allow the aspirants to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

The following are the Enabling Skills:

Grammar: It is the assessment of the correct usage of word form and word order while forming a sentence.

Oral Fluency: It is the ease, pace of your speech along with the delivery of speech that is tested.

Pronunciation: It is the way of speech that is understandable to the speakers of the language.

Spelling: It needs you to write the spellings as per the rules of the language. 

Vocab:It tests your choice of words to communicate or write in the English language.

Written Discourse: It checks your skills of logically developing the content with internal coherence and structure.

Part 1: Speaking and Writing

Read aloud

You get around 6-7 such questions that assess your Reading and Speaking skills, along with Content, Pronunciation and Oral Fluency.

Repeat Sentence

You get 10-12 such questions assessing your skills for Listening and Speaking along with Pronunciation, Content and Oral Fluency.

 

Describe Image

You have to answer 6-7 such questions that test your Speaking skills and content, pronunciation and oral fluency from the enabling skills.

Re-tell Lecture

 

This task has 3-4 questions assessing Listening and Speaking skills, along with Pronunciation and Oral Fluency skills.

Answer Short Questions

This task assesses your Listening and Speaking skills, along with Vocabulary.

Summarise Written Text

It assesses your Reading and Writing skills and Grammar, Vocabulary and Form from the enabling skills.

Essay Writing

In Essay, you will be assessed on your writing (content, linguistic range, structure, coherence, etc.) and Grammar, Vocabulary, Spelling.

Part 2: Reading

Reading and writing: Fill in the blanks

It assesses your Reading and writing skills.

The other tasks in Reading assess your reading skills alone.

Part 3: Listening

1. Multiple-choice Choose single answer, and Multiple-choice choose multiple answers assess only your Listening skills.
2. The tasks Highlight Correct Summary and Highlight Incorrect Words assess your Reading and Listening skills.
3. Fill in the Blanks and Write from Dictation assess your Reading and Writing skills. 
4. Summarise Spoken Text assesses your Listening and Writing skills among the Communicative Skills and Content, Form, Grammar, Vocabulary and Spelling from the enabling tasks.

Do some tasks carry Negative Marking in PTE-A?

The answer is both yes and no.

When it comes to negative marking, it is only the following tasks you need to bother about:

1. Multiple-choice, Choose Multiple Answers (Reading)
2. Multiple-choice, Choose Multiple Answers (Listening)
3. Highlight Incorrect Words (Listening)

In the above three tasks, you will lose points for choosing incorrect options, but the minimum score you will receive is 0.

Next Step: Take a PTE Mock Test

We hope that this blog has given you a clear picture of the scoring in the PTE-Academic Test. The next step is to take a PTE Mock Test, and test the waters, before diving right in. Our Scored and Unscored Practice Tests will give you a feel of the actual Exam. With a breakdown of your sub-skill scores, you will be able to understand your strengths and weaknesses.