I took my exam on November 12, 2025 in São Paulo.

I knew that results are available within 5 days, but the majority of people receive them within 48 hours, and some people even get them on the same day!

So after the exam, I checked every new email immediately to see whether it was my result or not. The result came in about 20 hours after the exam.

Background

I have always used English at work and have always worked in international teams where I had to communicate with people from different countries and with different accents.

However, during the last couple of years most of my meetings were in Russian, and I used English mostly for writing technical design documents, so I was not very confident about my speaking skills.

Additionally, two years ago I started taking lessons to reduce my accent, though they were quite irregular, felt more like a background activity rather than deliberate, focused effort.

So I had mixed feelings about whether I would be able to get a good score or not.

Preparation

I started preparing with a tutor about 5 months before the exam. I had 2 lessons a week, and initially they were mostly focused on English in general, and over time they became more and more PTE-focused.

Unfortunately, Pearson does not provide any official mock tests for PTE Core(official tests are available only for the Academic as of the time of writing), so I had to use the websites with unofficial mock tests.

Below are the results of my very first mock test on gurully. By that time I did not yet know anything about the exam structure, the types of tasks, etc

Then I studied with my teacher for several months, and about 1 month before the exam I have increased the pace of the preparation.

Since most of my preparation was with a teacher, I did not prolong the gurully subscription.

I have created a small pet project – PTE Word Counter – a mini tool that counts of words for PTE tasks, which was very convenient for me.

Since my gurully subscription was already expired by this time, I decided to try something new and I bought APEUni VIP subscription, and I tried to do full mock test every weekend and apart from that I did the speaking section test more often – once or twice a week. Below is my history there.

While I had quite decent results in Reading, Listening and Writing, in the Speaking part I was consistently getting low scores.

Typically, I got good “content” score but very low fluency and pronunciation score.

Here is what the scoring was like (this an example of Describe Image task scoring)

The suggestions of APEUni were not really helpful. And here how the AI speech recognition was showing my speech. Most of the words were either red or orange. Some of the words were not the ones I said at all!

Though real people usually understand me well. After all, English is the language which I used for my work throughout my whole career.

My hypothesis is that this AI (Gurully and Apeuni)is trained mostly on Asian and Indian accents, and does not work well for my Slavic accent, so I decided to take the real exam anyway, and find out whether the problem is with my speech or with the scoring engine.

Just one day before the exam, I made an uncut and unedited recording of how I passed the full mock PTE Core exam, and uploaded it on YouTube, just in case it would be useful for anyone, to get an idea about my performance.

Exam

For the exam I had to visit São Paulo, as there was not a certified examination center in the city where I currently live. The exam was well organized and overall was pleasant.

I had to leave all my belongings in a locker before entering the examination room. I had heard that on PTE exam multiple people are talking together, and was afraid that it could be a problem, but it was not an issue at all for me, because in the examination room there were cubicle partitions like in an open space office, and also the headphones isolated the noise quite well. At most, I could hear just quiet mumbling form other people, and it did not impact me in any way.

There was an erasable board, but I have not really used it. In most tasks it was much easier just to type what I hear in the input boxes on the computer (like in Summarize Spoken Text) and then just edit it.

There were just a couple of minor inconveniences. Firstly, you can’t take any water with you, and my mouth quickly went dry during the speaking part. Secondly, the keyboard layout was slightly different to the keyboard on my laptop, (though it was QWERTY keyboard) so I had to look at the keys sometimes, and was not able to type with full speed. But overall those problems were manageable.

Several pieces of advice I would give to myself when I just started preparing:

• don’t be afraid of low fluency/pronunciation scores on unofficial mock exams – they are just wrong
• practice those unofficial tests, because the real exam is very much like them
• verify and fix typos in all writing tasks – that alone can increase the score

Good luck with your PTE Exam!