PTE Academic 2025 Updates: New Speaking Tasks Explained

As you probably know, Pearson has announced key updates to the PTE Academic test format for 2025, introducing two new Speaking tasks while keeping the core structure intact. These changes aim to better reflect real-world communication skills without disrupting the familiar testing experience.

Although PTE is accepted by Australian immigration for certain visa categories, its recognition among professional bodies, academic institutions, and broader visa types has remained limited. This is largely due to concerns that the test can be passed through memorization and techniques that exploit AI scoring weaknesses. In response, Pearson has enhanced the test’s integrity and broaden its acceptance by introducing new question types and refining the scoring process. (See the Australian Home Affairs website here).

The test still runs for approximately two hours and retains all 20 original question types. Booking, pricing, ID requirements, and score delivery remain unchanged. These updates apply to both PTE Academic and PTE Academic UKVI, while PTE Core and PTE Home are unaffected.

Here is a rundown two new Speaking tasks straight from Jay at Pearsons:

• Respond to a Situation: Test-takers are presented with a scenario and asked to respond as they would in a real-life conversation. This task evaluates spontaneous, practical language use.

• Summarize Group Discussion: Candidates listen to a short group conversation and then summarize the key points. This task assesses comprehension and synthesis of spoken input.

Both tasks are scored using a combination of AI and human raters. Human scoring is limited to content evaluation and does not affect pronunciation or fluency scores. Pearson emphasizes that human raters follow the same published rubrics as the AI and never see personal details such as names or photos.

In total, seven of the 22 question types now use dual scoring. This “double marking” approach is designed to enhance fairness and accuracy without altering the scoring criteria.

For test-takers, the message is clear: the foundation of PTE Academic remains stable, but the new tasks offer a more authentic measure of speaking ability. Preparation resources, including updated practice tests and question banks, are available through Pearson’s official site.

These updates reflect Pearson’s commitment to evolving language assessment while maintaining consistency and reliability for global test-takers.

My Opinion on the updates?

A step in the right directions but still shows the limitation of computer based testing for candidates who require real life jobs.

Respond to a Situation: In everyday conversation, people don’t speak for 40 seconds straight in response to a minor situation—especially without pausing for the other person’s input. A one-way monologue in such contexts is unnatural and unnecessary. Other speaking tests have an examiner to respond but AI is not at that level of human examiners yet.

Summarize Group Discussion: This is variation of the other summary questions in the PTE speaking.

Part 3 of the IELTS provides useful source material for this type of language, even though the question formats differ significantly. Some of the underlying pedagogy overlaps—particularly the focus on understanding the gist of a conversation, identifying main ideas, attitudes, and outcomes. This is a shared aim in both IELTS Listening Part 3 and the new PTE Speaking tasks. I believe it’s an excellent listening exercise for students who haven’t lived or worked in a native-speaking environment, and a valuable addition to the summary-style questions.

For students already in Australia with a good level of English appropriate for their profession or goals, this should be a comfortable question if they just relax and be themselves. For students overseas with less real life English experience, it is a good taste of life in an English speaking country and if approached authentically (as Jay suggests), would be beneficial to their English and not just help the pass a test.

I’m currently working on a page of practice for the Summarize Group Discussion and IELTS part 3 listening together, so watch this space.