FAQ - Research 

Pearson has both internal and external groups working on all aspects of the test. There is a group of independent researchers conducting research on the field test results and a Technical Advisory Group comprised of experts from both language testing and psychometric fields. Their role is to provide feedback, advice and critical assessment of the development of PTE Academic.

Pearson is conducting a comprehensive research program to further knowledge in the field of language assessment. The results of these and other initiatives are also being used to inform the development of PTE Academic. Research is taking place in the following areas:


• Standard setting with the Common European Framework (CEF)
• Vocabulary development reflecting CEF as a function of PTE Academic test scores
• Sensitivity review of PTE Academic items

The following white papers are available to download:
• PTE Academic and automated scoring
• Field Testing PTE Academic globally
There is a published research profile on our website.  For more information please click here
Typically the correlations between two human scorers reach values between 0.80 and 0.90. Very skilled well-trained scorers may even reach 0.93 or 0.95. Machine scores typically correlate with expert human ratings at the same level as two human raters do. Machine scores correlate better with well trained expert human scorers, than with human scorers with low interrater agreement. Furthermore machine scoring is trained on a large pool of human scorers, more than 250 human scorers in the case of PTE Academic. This means that the machine scores are in fact closer to the scores from the ideal human rater than the scores from individual human raters, or even pairs of human raters.