How does PTE Academic mark different accents?

PTE Author
PTE Author
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Reading time: 2 minutes

Your accent will not stand in the way of success!

Everyone has an accent. You might even be a proficient or fluent English speaker, but with an accent, other people find hard to understand.

So how does your accent affect your score when you take PTE Academic?

Because PTE Academic is marked by a computer, it can cut out potential obstacles, such as a human examiner being unfamiliar with your particular accent.

When the automated scoring program was being designed the computer was trained using candidates from over 126 countries, speaking more than 90 different languages, so it recognizes accents from around the globe. As a result, PTE Academic’s automated scoring technology recognizes and marks everyone’s speech equally and with equal accuracy, regardless of where they are from. What the PTE Academic scoring engine looks for is intelligibility and clarity of response (not which accent you are speaking in) – did you answer in a clear and understandable way that any international speaker of English would understand?

To hear more on this, listen as one of our leading independent advisors, Dr Alistair Van Moere, a member of Pearson’s Technical Advisory Group, explains how it works.

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About Dr. Van Moere

Dr. Alistair Van Moere is the Chief Product Officer at MetaMetrics Inc. where his role is to drive innovation in assessments and learning and to help individuals and organizations make sense of measurement and test scores. Through the Lexile® Framework for Reading, Alistair’s work extends to over 35 million learners in 180 countries, who get connected with learning resources at their level and have their progress monitored against standards. 

Learn more about the PTE Technical Advisory Group

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