PTE Academic Writing — Tasks, Practice & Scoring
PTE Academic writing is two task types with unforgiving formal rules: a one-sentence Summarize Written Text (5–75 words, 10 minutes) and a 200–300 word essay in 20 minutes. Both are graded on form first — break the word or sentence rules and content marks stop mattering.
The PTE Academic writing task types
How PTE Academic writing is scored
Each task is graded against its own criteria — content, form, grammar, vocabulary, and for the essay, development and linguistic range. PTE Monster's AI grades your response against those criteria in seconds, with the real word limits enforced by a live counter, so you internalise the form rules long before test day.
Writing also receives marks from other tasks in the real exam — Summarize Spoken Text and Write from Dictation both feed the writing band — so listening practice is part of a writing strategy. Essay topics and SWT passages recur across papers too, and the prediction tiers surface the prompts appearing in recent exams, so your planning practice happens on the prompts most worth planning for.
Frequently asked questions
What writing tasks are in PTE Academic?
Two types: Summarize Written Text (one sentence of 5–75 words in 10 minutes) and Write Essay (200–300 words in 20 minutes). A typical exam has one of each.
What happens if I go over the word limit?
Responses outside the limits are penalised on form — which caps the whole task score. Practising with a live word counter builds the habit of finishing inside the window.
How fast is essay feedback?
AI grading returns a criteria-based score within seconds of submitting, so you can iterate on structure and range across multiple essays in one session.
Keep exploring
Practise with real exam questions
Repeated real questions ranked by prediction tiers, scored by AI in seconds.
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