TCF and TEF Canada practice test, under the clock

Reading is the section candidates most often assume they are fine at, because they are fine at it with unlimited time. The exam does not offer unlimited time. It offers sixty minutes for roughly forty questions across a dozen documents that get harder as they go, which works out at about ninety seconds each and means far less than that on the early ones so that there is more than that on the late ones.

So run it under the clock the first time, even though you will score worse. A paper done at leisure tells you what you can understand. A paper done in sixty minutes tells you what you can understand while deciding whether to move on, which is the thing actually being examined.

Never leave a box empty. Both exams give a point for a right answer and zero for a wrong one. There is no penalty for being wrong, so a blank costs exactly what an error costs while forfeiting the one-in-four a guess would have given you. The tool counts your blanks separately so the habit shows up in the result.

When it marks you, read the breakdown by document rather than the total. Marks are almost never spread evenly: they collapse on a particular kind of text, usually the opinion pieces and the administrative notices, and knowing which kind is the whole value of sitting a practice paper. The TCF Canada and the TEF Canada pages set out how the rest of each exam is built.