Editorial standards
How PTEMock practice content is built, reviewed, scored, corrected, and kept independent. Written so a student, an institute, or anyone else can audit our process from the outside.
On this page
1. Who runs PTEMock
PTEMock is an independent practice-test platform for the PTE Academic and PTE Core exams. We are a small team operating without institutional backing or licensing from any test publisher. We do not claim formal Pearson examiner credentials. Instead, we publish our methodology, scoring approach, and content sourcing openly so you can judge the practice on its merits, not on an appeal to authority. For who we are and how our scoring engine works, see the About page and How we evaluate.
2. Where content comes from
Every test item on PTEMock is original content authored for this platform. We do not host, redistribute, or paraphrase copyrighted Pearson test items. Where we describe the live exam, such as section length, item counts, task types and scoring conventions, we rely on Pearson's publicly available PTE Academic and PTE Core test descriptions and score-scale documentation.
Sources we use to keep content current:
- Pearson's public PTE Academic and PTE Core format overviews and task-type descriptions
- Pearson's published 10 to 90 score-scale and score-report documentation, used for calibration only, never reproduced verbatim
- Publicly accessible academic and general-English style sources for passage, lecture and image-prompt topics: peer-reviewed journals, university lecture transcripts, public-domain encyclopedias and public data sets for charts
- The published CEFR Companion Volume for level descriptors
All passages, conversations, lectures, images and prompts are drafted from scratch. Audio is generated using high-quality speech systems with a mix of accents that mirrors the live exam (a blend of British, North American, Australian and other international voices on the Listening and Speaking material).
3. 2026 PTE format compliance
Every PTEMock test follows the current official PTE specification for both products. In practice that means:
- Two products: PTE Academic and PTE Core, each scored on the 10 to 90 scale across the four communicative skills (Speaking, Writing, Reading, Listening) and six enabling skills.
- Task types: our tests are built only from the official set of 20 task types, with the correct prompt lengths, response times and per-task counts. The full list is on our format page.
- Section order and duration: Speaking and Writing first, then Reading, then Listening, in a single sitting of about two hours with no scheduled break, matching the live exam.
- Integrated scoring: tasks that feed more than one skill (for example Read Aloud into Speaking and Reading, or Write From Dictation into Listening and Writing) are weighted across skills the way the real exam does.
When Pearson publishes updates or clarifications to the format, we revise affected tests and note the change in the changelog (section 6).
4. Two-pass editorial review
Every item passes through two reviews before publication:
- Authoring review. The author drafts the item, the answer key, the distractors (for multiple-choice and highlight tasks), and a one-line rationale. They self-check for ambiguity, double-correct distractors, and mismatched difficulty.
- QA review. A second pass checks: does the item match the published task type, does timing fit the task budget, are distractors plausible without being defensibly correct, is the rationale aligned to the PTE criteria for Speaking and Writing, and is the audio clean for Listening and dictation tasks.
Items that fail QA are revised or held until they pass. We do not publish to hit a content quota.
5. Scoring and calibration
Reading and Listening are scored deterministically from the answer key on the 10 to 90 scale, including partial credit on item types that use it (such as Fill in the Blanks and Highlight Incorrect Words), where each correct selection earns marks and wrong selections can lose them.
Speaking and Writing are scored by our automated pipeline. Spoken responses are analysed acoustically for pronunciation, oral fluency and prosody on the actual recorded audio (Microsoft Azure Speech), transcribed (Deepgram), and assessed for content, grammar, vocabulary, spelling and written discourse by a large language model. Those signals are blended into the communicative and enabling skill scores. The full pipeline is documented in How we evaluate.
Calibration: our scoring is calibrated against Pearson's published score-scale and enabling-skill descriptors so that a given level of performance maps to a comparable band. We aim to keep our estimate close to real PTE banding for a given response. We do not claim perfect parity with Pearson's proprietary algorithm, and we do not claim that a score from us substitutes for an official score.
6. Updates and changelog
Major content updates, scoring-rule changes, and format-driven revisions are dated, and test-level revisions are reflected in each test page's dateModified structured-data field. When Pearson publishes a clarification we had not accounted for, we ship the change, retest affected items, and note what changed. If a test gets a substantial revision, the dateModified field is updated so you can see it is current.
7. Corrections and key disputes
If a question has a wrong answer key, an ambiguous distractor, a typo, or a passage with an inaccuracy, we want to know. Disputes go to hello@ptemocktests.net with the test ID and question number. Every reported issue is reviewed promptly.
When a confirmed error is found:
- The item is corrected and the test re-published.
- Reading and Listening scores for affected attempts are recomputed against the corrected key. Speaking and Writing scores stand unless the prompt itself was the source of the error.
- A note is added to the test's changelog with the date of the correction and a one-line description of what changed.
Disagreement with a Speaking or Writing score follows a separate path: email the same address with the test ID and the response you submitted. Score reviews are decided against the published PTE criteria, not against the student's expectation. We will explain the score rationale criterion by criterion, and we do not edit student work to fit a higher band.
8. Independence and trademarks
PTEMock is an independent test-preparation service. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Pearson Education Ltd or Pearson VUE. "PTE", "PTE Academic", "PTE Core" and "Pearson" are trademarks of their respective owners, used here only for descriptive reference to the test we prepare students for. CEFR is the trademark of the Council of Europe. Any score reported on PTEMock is a practice estimate for self-study and does not substitute for an official Pearson score.
We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or content direction from any test publisher, university, or migration consultancy. The content we publish reflects our own assessment of what students need to prepare; it is not influenced by external commercial interest.
9. Advertising and editorial separation
The platform is sustained by non-intrusive advertising and an optional paid tier. Advertising and editorial are kept separate:
- Advertisers do not receive editorial coverage. We do not publish sponsored articles, advertorials, or pay-for-placement content.
- Affiliate links, where used, are disclosed inline. Most external links from our content are non-affiliate informational references.
- Ads are delivered programmatically. We do not pre-select advertisers and we do not accept direct ad placements from companies we cover.
- Where we publish score-requirement or visa-requirement summaries, they source minimums and averages from publicly available data and are clearly labelled as compiled summaries rather than endorsements.
10. Student data and privacy
We collect the minimum data needed to score and return a result. For free practice attempts: an email address (used only to send the result link), the responses and audio you submit, and basic anonymised analytics (page, country, device class). For paid attempts: the same, plus the payment-processor reference. No card data is stored on our servers.
Detailed data handling, retention, third-party processors, and your rights are covered in the Privacy policy. To request data deletion or correction, email hello@ptemocktests.net.
11. Editorial contact
For corrections, key disputes, score reviews, partnership enquiries, or any editorial question, the canonical channel is email to hello@ptemocktests.net. The contact page has the same destination plus a form for non-email submissions.
This editorial standards page is reviewed on every material change to scoring or content sourcing. The most recent revision date is shown at the top of this page and in the structured-data dateModified field.