Do extra words lose marks in Write from Dictation?

No negative marking is documented for Write from Dictation. The official Score Guide lists it as 1 point for each correct word spelled correctly and 0 for each incorrect or misspelled word — there is no deduction line. So type every word you actually caught. A wrong extra word earns nothing, but it does not take away the points you already have.

The evidence that settles it

Pearson is explicit where negative marking exists. Highlight Incorrect Words and Multiple Choice Multiple Answers both print a deduction of one point for each incorrect response in their scoring tables. Write from Dictation has no such line.

That absence is the point. The same document that spells out deductions elsewhere does not spell one out here. That is far stronger evidence than the Quora threads and YouTube 'experiments' that dominate search results for this question and contradict each other.

What this means in the exam

If you caught seven words of a twelve-word sentence, type the seven. Partial credit is real: seven correctly spelled words is seven points, not a failed item.

If you are unsure whether the word was 'affect' or 'effect', pick one and move on. A guess costs nothing but time. Leaving a gap guarantees zero for that word.

Where padding does hurt you

Do not pad with filler in the hope that something sticks. Extra invented words cannot earn points, and the real cost is your typing window — every second spent inventing text is a second not spent recovering a word you genuinely heard while it is still in short-term memory.

The other hidden cost is order. Reconstructing the sentence around guessed words often makes you misplace the words you did hear, and misspelt or mistyped versions of real words score nothing.

How to practise this properly

Do WFD items in short daily sets rather than long weekly ones — it is a memory and spelling task, and it responds to frequency. After each item, write out the words you missed, then retype the full sentence once from the corrected version.

If you want quick feedback while doing that, mypteai.com marks individual items free (20 AI markings a day), which is enough for a focused WFD session.

PTE AI is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Pearson. PTE Academic is a trademark of Pearson. All practice material here is original and written for this site.