CELPIP Writing format: Practice Test 3

The CELPIP writing format is short enough to state completely: two tasks, 53 minutes, 150 to 200 words each, no choice of question, and no way back once the first timer ends. Almost everything else candidates worry about follows from those five facts, and test 3 below is a full sitting in that format.

The format at a glance

What the format fixes, and what it leaves to you

• The two tasks never vary. Task 1 is an email to a named or described recipient with exactly three bullet points. Task 2 is a survey with two options and no recipient at all.
• The length is fixed both ways. Both answers are 150 to 200 words. There is no long option, and a short answer is short against a stated target rather than against a guess.
• The clock is per task and does not pool. Twenty-seven minutes, then twenty-six, with an automatic advance in between and no return to the email.
• The register is never stated. The prompt names the recipient and leaves you to work out whether that person gets a formal or an informal email. Getting it wrong is a Task Fulfilment penalty, not a style note.
• The hard facts are not supplied. Dates, reference numbers and amounts are usually missing on purpose, and inventing them consistently is part of the task.
• The marking is human. Neither task has an answer key. Both are judged against the same four criteria by an assessor reading for meaning.

Task 1 in this format: the email about the heating

You have rented a unit at 214 Birchwood Court for eight months. For the past three weeks the heating has failed every evening and the unit drops to about 14 degrees overnight. You have phoned the office twice and left a message with the caretaker, and nothing has been repaired, although the lease says heating repairs are handled within 48 hours. The recipient is your landlord, so the format hands you a professional register and a genuine grievance to fit inside the same 200 words.

The bullets ask you to explain the problem, when it started and the dates you already reported it; to describe how the cold unit is affecting you and your household; and to request a specific repair by a specific date and say what you will do if it is not done. That last clause is the format working as designed. A bullet that asks for a consequence cannot be answered by being polite, and it cannot be answered by threatening either.

Task 2 in this format: the Community Learning Survey

Your community centre has funding for a new set of adult evening courses and is asking residents how they should be delivered. Option A is in-person classes at the centre on Tuesday and Thursday from 7:00 to 9:00, capped at 15 people, with free childcare on site and no way to make up a class you miss. Option B is the same two evenings taught live online, recorded and available for 30 days, with unlimited places, no childcare and no in-person contact with the instructor or the other students.

The format shows again here: both options work, and each carries the fact that defeats the other. Free childcare against thirty days of recordings, a cap of fifteen against unlimited places. A survey response that never mentions the option it rejected has used half of the material it was given and will read that way.

How the format is scored

Both tasks are assessed against the official descriptors on four criteria with fixed weights: Content and Coherence (30%), Readability (25%), Task Fulfilment (25%) and Vocabulary (20%). Each is banded 1 to 12 and combined into one weighted band for the section. Task Fulfilment is the criterion the format itself hands you: three bullets, one register, a word count and a single choice in Task 2 are all checkable before you write a sentence of English.