Did PTE Core change in 2026 — shorter test, new speaking tasks, AI scoring?
🚫 No change — No. The 2025 PTE overhaul applies only to PTE Academic. Pearson explicitly states "PTE Core and PTE Home are not affected." PTE Core is unchanged — and it's the version Canada accepts for PR.
What's confirmed (from the official source)
- PTE Core remains a single ~2-hour computer test, three parts (Speaking & Writing → Reading → Listening), fully machine-scored on the 10–90 scale. Write Email is 80–120 words; Summarize Written Text is 25–50 words.
- Pearson's official "PTE changes 2025" article states the changes "only affect PTE Academic and PTE Academic UKVI" and that "PTE Core and PTE Home are not affected."
- PTE Core's scoring page confirms it is scored by computer with "no interaction with a human examiner" — the AI-plus-human marking model is a PTE Academic feature, not Core.
What's just folklore
These claims circulate on prep and AI-tool sites but aren't in the official documentation:
- "PTE Core was shortened to ~2 hours in 2026" — misleading; PTE Core was always ~2 hours. It was PTE Academic that was shortened from ~3 hours.
- "Two new speaking tasks / AI+human scoring in PTE Core" — false for Core; those were added to PTE Academic. ("Respond to a Situation" exists in both; "Summarize Group Discussion" is Academic-only.)
pearsonpte.com — "PTE changes 2025" article (July 2025) + PTE Core format & scoring pages. Verified July 2026.