PTE negative marking: the 3 tasks that deduct marks (2026)

Which PTE tasks have negative marking

Pearson publishes this in the official Score Guide, task by task. Exactly three of the 22 scored question types carry a deduction, and all three share one feature: you choose several answers rather than one, so the test needs a way to stop you selecting everything.

That is the complete list. If a study group, a coaching centre or a YouTube video tells you that Reorder Paragraphs, Fill in the Blanks or Write from Dictation punish wrong answers, they are describing a test that does not exist.

How the deduction actually works

Each option you tick is scored on its own. A correct tick adds a mark. An incorrect tick subtracts one. The item total cannot fall below zero, which is the part most candidates misunderstand: a disastrous answer costs you the marks available on that item, and nothing more. It does not eat into your score on other questions, and it does not create a negative running total.

Here is a Reading Multiple Choice item with three correct options out of five, worked through:

Read the third row again. Ticking every box is the single most expensive habit in this task: it looks like it guarantees the correct answers, and it does, but the wrong ones cancel most of them out. You end up level with someone who found only one correct option.

Reading Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

You get two to three of these in a Reading section, and the prompt tells you that more than one response is correct. It never tells you how many. That is deliberate, and it is what makes the task hard: you have to decide where the evidence stops.

The reliable method is to treat each option as a separate true or false question against the passage, and to require a sentence you can point at. If you cannot underline the words that make an option true, do not tick it. An option that is probably true, or true of the world but not stated in this passage, is a mark lost rather than a mark gained.

Two patterns cause most wrong ticks. The first is the absolute qualifier: an option that says every, always, never or all where the passage said most or often. The second is the true-but-unstated fact, which reads correctly because it matches what you already know about the topic. You can drill both on our Reading section pages.

Listening Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

Same marking, much less thinking time. You hear the recording once, you cannot replay it, and the options are on screen while you listen. Two to three of these appear in the Listening section.

Because there is no text to go back to, the method has to shift. Read the options before the audio starts, so you know what you are listening for. During the recording, mark the options you positively heard supported. Afterwards, tick only those. The temptation is to add one more from memory because it "sounds like something the speaker said", and that is exactly the tick that costs a mark.

Watch for the speaker who raises an idea and then rejects it. A recording that says "you might assume the cost is the obstacle, but in practice it is the training" contains both a wrong option and a right one, spoken seconds apart in the same sentence. Our Listening section section drills that pattern.

Highlight Incorrect Words

A transcript appears on screen and the recording plays. Some words in the transcript differ from what the speaker actually says, and you click those. Each correctly clicked word earns a mark, each wrongly clicked word loses one, and the item floors at zero.

This is the task where over-clicking does the most damage, because a transcript gives you a hundred-odd chances to be wrong. Candidates who click anything that sounds slightly off routinely score zero on an item where they genuinely caught three of the five substitutions.

The discipline is to follow the text with your eyes at the speaker's pace, and click only on a clear mismatch you heard, in the moment. If you lose your place, do not go back and hunt: re-find the speaker's position and carry on. The words you would have caught by hunting are worth less than the wrong clicks you avoid.

The tasks people think deduct marks, but do not

This is where most of the anxiety lives, and almost all of it is misplaced.

The Write from Dictation myth is the most widespread and the most costly, because it stops people typing a sentence they half-remember. Every word you get right is a mark. Type everything you can recall.

Should you guess? The arithmetic

On the 19 tasks with no deduction, guessing costs you nothing. A blank answer and a wrong answer both score zero, so leaving anything empty is a mark you have chosen not to try for. Always answer.

One corollary worth spelling out: a memorised answer key from a repeated-questions or prediction list is at its most dangerous on exactly these three tasks. Options get reshuffled between sittings, so a key that has drifted does not merely fail to help, it actively subtracts. Everywhere else a stale key is wasted effort; here it costs you marks.

On the three tasks that deduct, the maths is still friendlier than it feels. Each option is independent, so the question is never "should I guess on this item" but "am I more likely to be right than wrong on this option". If you think an option is more likely correct than not, ticking it has positive expected value. If it is a coin flip, ticking gains you nothing on average. If you are leaning against it, ticking costs you.

In practice that reduces to one rule: tick what you can evidence, skip what you cannot, and never tick everything. The floor at zero also means that once an item has clearly gone wrong, no further damage is possible, so there is no reason to panic into a worse answer on the next question.

How to practise the deducting tasks

These three tasks reward restraint, and restraint is a habit you can only build against real marking. Practising on material that marks all-or-nothing teaches you nothing about the trade-off, because it never punishes the extra tick.

Our mock tests apply the deduction exactly as described above, including the zero floor, and the per-question review afterwards shows what you earned and what you lost on each item, so you can see which of your ticks were speculative. The score chart explains how a raw mark on one item becomes a band on the report. The full PTE exam pattern shows how many of each deducting task you will actually face.

One drill worth repeating: on your next practice attempt, answer every Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers item with only the options you can justify out loud, then look at what a maximal answer would have scored. Most candidates find their restrained answer beats their instinct by a mark or two per item.

Quick reference: PTE negative marking at a glance