What the estimated level means
Why it says estimated, why a single recording cannot settle it, and why we sometimes show no number at all rather than guess.
The number at the top of your snapshot is an estimate on this recording only. It is not an official score, and we are not affiliated with any testing organisation.
Why “estimated”
An official result comes from a full test, several tasks, and trained human raters. Your snapshot comes from one take of one task, read by a machine. The two are not the same kind of thing, and calling ours a score would be dishonest.
What it is useful for is direction. One number tells you very little. Ten of them, over two weeks, tell you whether you are moving.
Why we sometimes show no number
If a recording is very short, or too quiet, or in another language, or the transcription came back doubtful, we show ··· instead of a level.
That blank is deliberate, and it is the most important rule in the product:
A confident verdict on a doubtful recording is worse than saying nothing.
Someone preparing for an exam changes what they practise based on what we tell them. A number we do not trust would send you to work on something that was never the problem — and make you distrust everything else we said.
So when we cannot tell, we say we cannot tell.
It gets better with more takes
Each Speaking Check adds a sample. The estimate becomes steadier as they accumulate, in the same way that one photograph tells you less than ten.