CET 4 and 6 Have No Pass Mark and No Speaking Test

Almost every English language description of China's college English test repeats the same two things. That 425 is the pass mark, and that CET is the exam Chinese students must clear.

We went and read what the Ministry of Education's own testing centre publishes. Neither claim survives contact with the source. There is no pass mark, and there is no speaking inside the score at all.

SpeakShark is free if you want to work on the speaking side of this, three AI conversation sessions a day with no card.

In this guide: the 710 with no pass mark · what the 710 is made of · speaking is a separate exam · SET4 in minutes · the level that drops read aloud · the exam that does require speaking · the PETS-5 contradiction · what to do about it · method · FAQ

Key takeaways

• The exam body states plainly that CET reporting is norm referenced and that no pass line is set. The 425 everyone quotes comes from universities and employers, not from the test.
• The 710 point total is listening 249, reading 249, translation and writing 212. Those add to exactly 710, so speaking contributes nothing.
• Speaking is a separate optional test, CET-SET4 and CET-SET6, held twice a year in May and November and administered by computer.
• CET-SET4 gives you roughly four and a half minutes of actual speech, and a full minute of that is reading someone else's passage aloud.
• CET-SET6 drops the read aloud entirely. The higher level is the one that stops asking you to recite.
• The Chinese exam that does make speaking compulsory is WSK, and it decides who gets state funding to study abroad.

The 710 that has no pass mark

The official score explanation page carries this sentence:

大学英语四、六级考试的分数报道采用常模参照方式，不设及格线

Reporting is norm referenced, and no pass line is set. The scores you receive are not measured against a fixed standard of competence. They are converted against a norm group, and the exam body publishes who that group is: roughly thirty thousand non English major candidates at sixteen universities for CET-4, and roughly five thousand at five key universities for CET-6.

That changes what your number means. A CET-4 total of 450 sits at the twenty fifth percentile of the norm group. A 500 sits somewhere between the forty fourth and the fifty fifth. A 590 reaches the ninetieth.

So the score people celebrate as a pass is, by the exam body's own table, in the bottom quarter of the reference population.

None of this makes 425 meaningless. It makes it someone else's rule. Universities attach it to graduation, employers attach it to shortlisting, and postgraduate programmes attach it to eligibility. Those are real consequences. They are simply not the exam body's line, which means they can differ between two institutions sitting on the same street.

What the 710 is actually made of

The same page sets out the components and their weights.

Add the three maximums and you get 249 plus 249 plus 212, which is 710 exactly. There is no remainder, and therefore no room for a spoken component anywhere in the reported result.

This is the kind of finding that only appears when you add the published numbers instead of reading the published description. The description says four sections. The arithmetic says the four sections are listening, reading, translation and writing, and that speaking is not among them.

Speaking is a separate exam and it is optional

CET does have a spoken test. It is simply not part of the score above, and you have to choose to sit it.

The oral page states that the test runs twice a year, in May and November, that only English currently has spoken subjects, and that these are CET-SET4 and CET-SET6. It is delivered as a computer based test. On eligibility the wording is:

凡已经报考笔试科目的考生均可报考对应级别的口试科目

Anyone who has registered for the written paper may register for the oral at the corresponding level. May, not must. Registration for the written test is the only gate.

For a student whose university checks a written score and whose employer checks the same written score, the incentive to sit an extra optional exam is thin. Which is how a country ends up with an enormous English testing system that produces very little evidence about whether anyone can speak.

The practical answer is not another test. It is speaking often enough that the ability exists before anyone asks for proof of it, which is what our free daily sessions are for.

If you are preparing for a test that genuinely scores speech, the shape of the task matters more than the vocabulary list. Our walkthroughs of OPIc, CELPIP speaking tasks and the TOEIC speaking test are built around that idea.

CET-SET4 measured in minutes not parts

Here is the published structure of CET-SET4, with the exam body's own per candidate speaking times.

Five parts sounds substantial. Add the durations and the picture changes. Excluding the share of the paired task that belongs to your partner, you speak for roughly four and a half minutes inside a test that occupies about ten.

Then look at what those minutes contain. A full minute of the four and a half is reading a text you did not write. Another twenty seconds is a self introduction, which every candidate rehearses. What is left of genuinely unscripted speech is closer to three minutes.

Adding published durations is the single most reliable way to find out what an exam is really measuring. It worked the same way on the Cambridge ladder and on Aptis.

The level that stops making you read aloud

Now compare the two levels line by line, which is where the second finding lives.

CET-SET6 has fewer parts and more speech. It removes the read aloud completely, extends the individual presentation by half a minute, and keeps the paired discussion.

That is a clear statement about what each level is for. At the lower level the exam is willing to accept recitation as evidence. At the higher level it is not. The task that disappears is the one where the words belong to somebody else.

Anyone treating SET6 as simply a harder SET4 has the relationship backwards. It is not the same test with rarer vocabulary. It is a test that has removed the crutch.

The exam that does make speaking compulsory

If CET is the famous exam, WSK is the consequential one, and almost nothing about it is written in English.

WSK is the national foreign language proficiency test. The exam body describes its purpose directly: the scores are used mainly to select candidates for state sponsored study abroad. Five languages are offered, and the English paper is PETS-5.

Its pass table is where the comparison pays.

Read the oral column across, not down. English speaking is marked out of five. French, Japanese and Russian get twenty points of resolution. German gets twenty eight.

The most sat language is graded on the coarsest scale of the five. One point is the entire distance between a certificate and no certificate, and there is no room in a five point scale for a candidate to be a little better or a little worse than the line.

And unlike CET, sitting the oral is not optional. A candidate who turns up gets a score notice, but the certificate requires both the written and the oral component to be satisfied. Speaking is load bearing here in a way it never is in CET.

That pattern repeats across countries. The exam that decides something for a person is rarely the exam everybody has heard of, which is why we keep reading regulators rather than test prep sites, as with the GMC in the UK, nursing in Canada and Italian public competitions.

The PETS-5 question two official pages answer differently

One more thing the source settles, because English language descriptions get it wrong almost universally.

因此PETS-5不再属于PETS，而是归为全国外语水平考试（WSK）

PETS-5 therefore no longer belongs to PETS and is classified under WSK instead. This happened in September 1999, when PETS-5 replaced the older English proficiency test used for state sponsored study abroad candidates.

Then read the PETS site, which says something different:

PETS共有五个级别

PETS has five levels. Same ministry, same testing centre, two pages that do not agree on whether the thing has four levels or five.

Both are defensible once you see what each is describing. The PETS page is describing the ladder of levels, and level 5 is on it. The WSK page is describing administration, and level 5 is run by WSK on WSK's calendar, in May and November, while levels 1 to 4 run in March and September through provincial bodies.

The practical answer for a candidate is the one that matters. If you want PETS-5 you do not register where you would register for PETS-3. You go to WSK, sit it on WSK dates, and are measured against the WSK pass table. Treating it as simply the next rung is how people miss a registration window by six months.

What this means if you are preparing

Four practical consequences.

• Find out whose 425 you are being held to. The exam body sets no line, so the number that matters to you comes from your university, your employer or your target programme. Ask them, in writing where you can.
• Read your score next to the percentile table, not on its own. A 500 sounds much better than a 450 and is worth about twenty percentile points, which is a different sentence entirely.
• If you need evidence you can speak, CET will not give it to you. The written score contains none. Either sit CET-SET, or sit an exam whose result includes speech.
• If your route is state sponsored study abroad, the oral is not optional. Plan for a five point scale where one point decides the outcome.

The uncomfortable part is that most preparation is aimed at the written test, because that is what gets checked. Speaking practice tends to start only when someone suddenly needs it. Talking daily is what closes that gap, and it does not require a test to be booked first. Our free plan gives three full conversation sessions a day, and the pricing page is honest about what the paid tier adds.

For the wider picture of which tools are worth your time, we keep an updated comparison of speaking apps and a plain how it works walkthrough.

How we researched this guide

Every figure here comes from pages published by the Ministry of Education's testing centre, opened in a browser rather than summarised from memory. We navigated from the authority's own exam list rather than guessing at URLs, after a guessed address returned a 404.

We do not read Chinese testing pages as a native speaker would, so we have quoted the load bearing sentences in the original alongside our reading of them. Where we could not verify something we have left it out. In particular we have not verified any individual university's graduation rule, and we make no claim about what any specific institution requires.

We also did not test the claim that most students skip the oral exam. The exam body publishes the eligibility rule, not the take up rate, so the incentive argument above is reasoning rather than measurement.

FAQ

We are a speaking improvement tool. We are not an exam preparation provider, and we are not affiliated with the Ministry of Education testing centre, Cambridge English or any exam board. For test format, booking and official practice material, go to the exam body directly. Use SpeakShark to make your spoken English stronger, and use official material to learn the test.

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• Support: speaksharksupport@gmail.com
• Free tier: 3 AI conversation sessions per day, no card

Sources

• CET score explanation, Ministry of Education testing centre
• CET oral test structure and eligibility
• WSK exam introduction and pass table
• PETS exam introduction, levels and oral component
• National Education Examinations Authority exam list

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