CELPIP Writing Practice Test 1

A writing practice test is only worth sitting if it puts the same two problems in front of you that the exam does, on the same clock. Test 1 does: 27 minutes to write a formal complaint that has to stay polite while it presses for a remedy, then 26 minutes to pick a side in a town planning survey and defend it with the numbers you were handed. Nothing carries over between the two, and the timer moves you on whether or not the email is finished.

Task 1: the formal email to Maple Ridge Movers

You hired Maple Ridge Movers last month to move your belongings to a new apartment. Unpacking, you found a glass cabinet cracked and a box of kitchen items missing. The crew leader told you to contact the office, and two phone calls have gone unanswered since. The email is addressed to the customer service manager, and that recipient sets the register on its own: professional, specific, unmistakably a complaint, and free of any sentence you would not want read back to you.

The three bullets ask for the exact date of the move, your booking number and the amount you paid; a description of the damaged and the missing items and how you discovered the problem; and a statement of what you want the company to do and by what date you expect a reply. The first bullet is the one candidates under-write. None of those three facts is in the prompt, so you invent all three and then stay consistent with them, and an email that says you paid a lot rather than a figure has answered a third of the task with nothing.

Task 2: the City Development Survey

Your town of 10,000 people has a large undeveloped green area in its centre and $4 million set aside to build on it. Option A is a shopping complex: a large supermarket, a movie theatre and about a dozen restaurants and shops, roughly 200 local jobs and new tax revenue, at the price of paving over most of the green space. Option B is a recreational park: a sports field, walking trails, a playground and a small outdoor rink, free to use and open year round, creating only a handful of jobs and costing the town about $200,000 a year to maintain.

Both options are defensible and each arrives with a number you can argue from. Two hundred jobs against two hundred thousand dollars a year is the whole debate in one line. The answers that score name the drawback of their own choice and meet it, rather than writing as though it were not printed on the page, and the habit that sinks a survey response is drifting: choose in the first sentence and stay chosen.

How this practice test runs

Task 1 opens with 27 minutes and the on-screen editor. When that timer expires the test advances to Task 2 by itself, gives it 26 minutes, and closes the email for good. Fifty-three minutes in total, two answers of 150 to 200 words, and no break between them. Sitting it in one go is the part that cannot be simulated by writing the two prompts on separate evenings.

What comes back

Both answers are read against the official 2026 descriptors and returned with a CLB band from 1 to 12, a band on each criterion, a written summary of what cost you marks, your own text with the errors marked and corrected, and a high-band rewrite of what you actually wrote. The rewrite is the part worth studying, because it keeps your content and repairs only the expression, so the distance between your paragraph and its rewrite is the distance between your band and a higher one.