Choosing between English tests: questions to ask yourself

"Which English test is best?" gets you arguments, not answers. A more useful question is which tests the people reading your result accept, and which format you perform well in. This post gives you the questions to ask. The answers depend on you.

One thing to say plainly: this site is built around PTE Academic practice, so we are not a neutral judge of the tests, and we will not rank any of them. Everything below can be checked on each provider's own website, and since formats change, check it there rather than here.

Start with who has to accept the result

If a university, employer or professional body will read your result, its list of accepted tests comes first. Some organisations accept several tests, some accept one, and some accept only a particular version of a test. Find the list on the organisation's own site, or ask. If only one test is accepted, the rest of this post matters much less. If several are accepted, you have a real choice and the next questions start to count.

Questions about the format

• Delivery: is it taken on a computer or on paper? At a test centre or at home?
• Speaking: do you speak to a person or into a microphone? Some people relax with a human examiner who nods back. Others find a face distracting and speak better to a computer. PTE Academic, for the record, is computer-based and records your voice.
• Writing: do you type or write by hand? A slow typist and a slow writer will not suit the same test.
• Task style: do you prefer many short, varied tasks or fewer, longer ones?
• Marking: is your work marked by software, by a person or by both, and does that bother you either way?

Questions about the practicalities

• Results: how long until you and the organisation have them?
• Availability: how many test dates are near you, and how far ahead do they fill up?
• Retakes: how soon can you sit again, and what happens to earlier results?
• Validity: how long will the organisation accept a result?

Write the answers down for each test. A test that fails on the first question, because the organisation does not accept it, is out before the format even matters.

People will tell you that one test is easier than another. What they usually mean is that it suited their strengths. A face-to-face interview is not harder or easier than a recorded answer in general. It is different, and the difference helps some candidates and hurts others. Ask friends what they experienced by all means, but treat each answer as one voice, not a verdict.

A worked example

Here are two imaginary candidates, for illustration only. Anita types fast, has a quiet room at home and goes blank when someone watches her speak. A computer-delivered test with typed writing and recorded speaking may suit her. Marcus writes neatly by hand, types slowly and speaks best to a person who reacts. A test with handwriting and a spoken interview may suit him. Neither is choosing the better test. Each is choosing the one that gets out of their way.

Try a sample of each

Before you commit, try a sample of every test still on your list. Use the provider's own sample tasks or practice material, and do one speaking task and one writing task from each, with the same timer in the same quiet room. Afterwards write two lines per test: how it felt, and what got in your way.

Add a short measurement for the writing side. Type a paragraph of about 150 words from a newspaper article and time yourself, then copy the same paragraph by hand and time that. If one is much slower for you, you have learnt something that no opinion could have told you.

Put those notes beside your lists. The test that is accepted, available in time and comfortable to sit is usually the sensible choice. Once you have chosen, give it a fair run: switching after one bad mock throws away the format practice you have already done. Switch only when new information, such as a changed requirement, alters the answer.

If PTE Academic stays on your list, the practice tests on this site let you try its tasks under test conditions with AI-estimated feedback. Once you have chosen a test and found its requirements, planning around score requirements shows how to turn them into a timeline.