Speak & Improve gives you a simple automatic estimate of your speaking level. It is not a real Cambridge English exam, and the score is only a guide to help you practise.
Speak & Improve is not an examiner
Speak & Improve uses an experimental system to estimate your English speaking level. This system is designed for research and practice, and it is not part of the official marking processes used for Cambridge English Qualifications, Linguaskill, or any other Cambridge English exam.
Your score in Speak & Improve:
is only an estimate
is given by an automatic system, not by human examiners
uses a different method from Cambridge’s official exams
does not follow the full quality‑assurance procedures used in high‑stakes assessments
So, your Speak & Improve score should be seen as a guide to help you understand your level, practise your speaking, and track your progress over time. It cannot be used as proof of English ability and should not be compared directly with the results of Cambridge English exams.
If you need an official, certified English result, please choose one of the recognised Cambridge English exams, which are marked by trained experts and follow strict quality‑assurance procedures.
I am a native speaker. Why is my score so low?
Computers are not yet capable of understanding speech in the same way as a human being. They do not have the same context or life experience that a human can bring to bear.
Speak & Improve uses a statistical analysis of a large number of features extracted from a learner's speech, which is then compared against the same features extracted from a large corpus of “training data” (speech from EFL students) for which we already have information about the level of proficiency.
These features are indicative of the student's level of attainment: some are indicative of good speaking, others of lower level production. Speak & Improve combines these positive and negative indications together to generate the final score for a learner's speaking.
Speak & Improve gives fairly accurate results across a wide range of learners’ submissions and, as this research project progresses and more learners use Speak & Improve, the accuracy of these scores will continue to improve.
However, this also means that Speak & Improve is only accurate on the type of speech that it’s been trained on. In particular, because it’s been trained on the speaking output of EFL learners, it does not provide accurate results for the speech of fluent native speakers. The features extracted from a fluent native speaker’s speech are different, and do not appear in the training data, so Speak & Improve is unable to judge them.
Simply put, your English may be “too English” for Speak & Improve to be able to judge it.
Given speaking output by genuine EFL students (the kind of speech that Speak & Improve has been trained on) you will see much more accurate results. If that is not the case, please do let us know.