If you have ever taken a PTE exam you know how it feels to sit in front of a screen with a fast audio playing in your headphones. You get this feeling that no matter how well you speak English the test is not checking your English skills. The test is checking your ability to focus, candidate stamina, and ability to figure out the questions.
For Anu, who’s a nurse from Kottayam, Kerala, this feeling was something she experienced every day. Anu had a dream to move to Australia and work as a nurse. To do this she needed to get a score in the PTE Academic test at least 65 in all areas. Anu speaks English well. She knows a lot of medical terms because of her nursing background. Every time she took a practice test, she got a low score in the listening part, only 50.
My student Anu prepared for the PTE Listening test like how she practiced Summarize Spoken Text and Write from Dictation. The truth is, the PTE test is not just about passing the tough questions. Anu found out that after she finished the parts there were more problems waiting for her. She found some traps in the test that can stop even good students from doing well.
Let us see how Anu dealt with the PTE Listening test what problems she faced and how she finally got a good score more than 65 in the PTE Academic test, which is the PTE test that Anu needed to take to move to Australia and work as a nurse. The PTE Listening module was a big challenge for Anu.
Phase 1: The Illusion of Progress (Why the 60s Plateau Happens)
When Anu first came to me for training, I could see that she was really struggling. She would miss words all the time; her notes were over the place with words that were not even spelled correctly, and the Write from Dictation task felt like a memory game that she just could not win.
We worked together to fix these problems. I changed the way she was doing things so she was not writing down every word. Instead, we used shorthand keyword mapping. I taught her how to picture the lectures in her mind like movies so she would not get tired after just 40 seconds. We made a format for her summaries and used the initial-letter method for dictation. After that her scores started to get better. She was no longer scoring in the 50s. For students this would be a big deal. Anu wanted to score 65 or more, so she was not happy with her progress.
Her mock test scores were not changing. Week after week she was scoring around 65. She was not making the big mistakes that she used to make but she was still losing points. She felt tired, frustrated and confused. One day when we were going over her works, she said to me, “Stan, sir, I am doing everything you taught me. I am not writing sentences anymore. I am staying focused. My score is just not getting better. Where am I losing all these points?”
To figure out what was going on I had to look at the things that can hurt her score on the PTE Listening test like negative marking tasks and contextual blind spots, which are the PTE Listening test issues that Anu was facing.
Phase 2: Unmasking the Three New Traps
When a student reaches an intermediate plateau like Anu did, the problem is rarely about language ability. It is about microscopic execution errors. Here are the three hidden traps that were keeping Anu trapped in the 60s.
Trap 1: The Panic Click in Highlight Incorrect Words (HIW)
In the Highlight Incorrect Words task, the audio. The text scrolls on the screen at the same time. The speaker will say some words that are not the same as the words on the screen. The candidate’s job is to click on the words that are not the same as what the speaker says.
It sounds easy. But there is a problem: if you click on a word that is actually incorrect, you will lose a point. Anu had a problem with this task. She got very nervous. When the speaker talked fast like some British and Australian speakers do, Anus’s heart would beat fast. She was so scared of missing a word that was not the same as the text; she would get very alert. Click on any word that sounded a little different.
Most of the time she would click on words that were actually correct, they were just spoken with an accent. Her screen would look like a mess, with all the clicks. She was hurting her score because she was clicking too much. Every time she clicked on a word by mistake, she would lose points that she had earned from other tasks.
Trap 2: The Spelling Paralysis in Listening Fill in the Blanks (FIB)
When you are doing listening fill-in-the-blanks, you have to write down the missing words in a story while you are listening to someone talk.
Anu knew a lot of words. When the person talking, Anu, wanted to get it just right, exactly as the audio. When she heard a space, she would stop and think. She would try to spell the word out one letter at a time and check if it had an ‘a’ or an ‘e’ in the middle.
While Anu was thinking about how to spell one word, the person talking kept going. They would say the three sentences, and there would be two more blank spaces. Anu was so busy trying to spell one word that she forgot what the story was about. She would get one word right. Then she would miss the other listening fill-in-the-blanks and leave them empty.
Trap 3: The Over-Analysis Paralysis in Multiple-Choice, Multiple Answers (MCMA)
The listening part of the test has multiple-choice questions that waste a lot of time. Anu used to read all the answers before the audio started and then look for matching sentences while the lecture was playing.
The problem is that the people who make the PTE test are really good at playing with people’s minds. They like to use distractor options, which are statements that sound very smart and use words from the lecture, but they change the speaker’s main point in a subtle way.
Anu was trying to match the options with what the speaker was saying. She fell into their trap.
She would pick options that sounded good based on one sentence. She would miss the main point of what the speaker was saying. And because the multiple choice, multiple answers part of the test takes away points for answers picking a wrong option did not just give her zero points; it actually took away the points she had already earned from the PTE test. The multiple-choice questions in the listening module are a problem for Anu.
Phase 3: The Psychological and Tactical Pivot
Recognizing these invisible mistakes meant you had to change how Anu interacted with her computer screen. You could not just tell her to “try harder” or “be more careful.” You had to engineer physical habits that bypassed her anxiety and forced her brain into alignment with how the PTE scoring algorithm actually works.
Here is how she systematically dismantled each of those three new hurdles.
Strategy 1: The Cursor-Tracking Anchor (Conquering HIW)
To stop Anu from clicking much during Highlight Incorrect Words, she had to take control of her hand.
I made a rule for her, which I called The Cursor Rule.
- When the audio starts, put the mouse cursor at the beginning of the line of text.
- Move your cursor one word at a time, going at the speed of the person speaking.
- Keep your eyes on the cursor at all times.
This really helped Anu. The reason it worked is that when she uses her eyes and hands together, it helps us focus on what is happening now. By making her hand move with the text she stopped worrying about what she heard or what was coming next.
If the sound was just a little different because of an accent, her eyes and ears could handle it. She would not click. Anus Highlight Incorrect Words scores got a lot better.
Strategy 2: The 3-Letter Shorthand Placeholder (Conquering Listening FIB)
For the Listening Fill in the Blanks section, where Anu had been suffering from a bout of spelling paralysis, she was decoupled from spelling and made to concentrate solely on the listening part of the activity and merely record the sounds to be used as placeholders for spelling later.
You are not a spelling bee champion right now! You are a data recorder. Your job on the first pass is to record the data, catch the sound, and record a placeholder for the word. Stay alive!
Anu wrote a 3-4 letter word marker or the first few letters that she recognized to be part of the root word of the term and immediately continued to listen to the rest of the audio. Anu was able to view her past audio clips in the PTE interface after the audio had stopped playing. But the more important thing for her was that she kept pace with the speaker and, therefore, had adequate contextualization to all of the paragraphs she was listening to. All she had to do afterwards was go through her text to look for the placeholders she had written in order to spell them correctly.
Strategy 3: The Elimination Mindset (Conquering MCMA)
For Multiple-Choice Multiple Answers she completely changed the way Anu approached these questions. From trying to find the correct answer, Anu learned to look for the wrong answers.
She made a plan to help her:
- Anu never reads all the options before the teacher starts talking. This just fills her head with things that are not important and can trick her. Instead she listens to the teacher carefully and writes down simple notes with keywords.
- Anu checks the options for words that are too strong. If an option has words like “always,” “never,” “all,” or “every,” it is usually wrong. She crosses these out.
- Anu looks for answers that are not related to what the teacher is talking about. If an option talks about something that is true but was not mentioned in the lecture, she gets rid of it.
By focusing on getting rid of the answers Anu stopped doubting herself. She stopped picking answers that sounded good but were actually wrong. She kept her score safe from losing points. Started doing well on the multiple-choice parts of the test.
Phase 4: The Transformation and the 79 Reality
When you see a student change a lot over months of hard work, you start to understand that exams like the PTE can be very tough on our minds. They show us the things that make us feel bad about ourselves. Our fear of not being good enough our need to be perfect, our tendency to get really stressed when things happen fast and our desire to control everything.
For Anu getting a score of 65 or more was not about learning English rules or getting better at nursing words. She already knew those things. She did well when she stopped thinking of the test as something to fight and started thinking of it as a game to play smart.
- She stopped trying to remember everything in the Summarize Spoken Text part. Started finding the important words instead.
- She stopped getting tired after 40 seconds of listening to lectures. Learned how to picture what she was hearing so she could keep going.
- She stopped worrying about spelling and accents in the Write from Dictation part by using a method that worked well for her.
- She stopped losing points because of answers by using a system to track her choices and eliminate the wrong ones.
When she finally got her score, the numbers were great. She got 84 in Listening 74 in Reading 80 in Speaking and 78 in Writing.
The nurse from Kottayam had done it. Her dream of going to Australia was no longer something she saw on her computer. It was real. She had applied for a visa, booked a flight, and was ready to start a life in healthcare.
What Anu’s Journey Means for You?
If you are reading this while sitting at your desk, wrestling with a low PTE listening score, feeling like the audios are too fast, the accents are too thick, and the time pressure is too cruel, take a deep breath.
Anu’s story proves an essential truth: Your failure to score high is rarely a reflection of your intelligence. If you are stuck, it is simply because you are using brute-force effort where strategic execution is required. You are trying to muscle your way through a machine-scored exam that rewards structure, emotional control, and tactical discipline over raw memorization.
Shift your mindset. Stop trying to catch every single word. Embrace shorthand. Protect your energy. Master the mechanics of the tasks. If a nurse from the hillside of Kottayam can take a broken score of 50, systematically dismantle her habits, and walk out of the test center with a stellar 79, then so can you. The audio track is still going to play fast, and the accents are still going to be tricky, but once you change how you listen, you won’t just survive the test; you will own it.
Ready to Break Your Own Plateau? Train with Tiju’s Academy
Anu did not find these strategies on her own. The Cursor Rule, the 3-letter placeholder method and the Elimination Mindset came from a trainer who could look past her score and identify exactly where the points were leaking.
That is what Tiju’s Academy, the best PTE coaching centre in Kerala, does. Our PTE training goes beyond generic tips and templates. We diagnose your specific error patterns the panic clicks, the spelling freezes, the distractor traps and build tactical habits that work with the scoring algorithm instead of against it.
What you get:
- Module-wise strategy training for Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing
- Task-specific techniques for the high-risk, negative-marking questions
- Regular mock tests with detailed score analysis
- One-to-one mentoring and personalised feedback from experienced trainers
- Accent and pace training so fast audio stops being a threat
- Flexible online and offline batches
If your score has stalled in the 50s or 60s, you do not need more English. You need better execution.
Anu was a nurse from Kottayam with a 50 in Listening. She left the test centre with an 84. Your turn.
Talk to Tiju’s Academy today, the best PTE academy in Kerala, and start scoring the way you already deserve to.
Frequently Asked Questions:
A: A nurse from Kottayam, Kerala, who wanted to move to Australia and work as a nurse. She needed at least 65 in every section of PTE Academic.
A: Her problem was not language ability. At an intermediate plateau, the losses come from microscopic execution errors, not English skills.
A: She began around 50 in Listening and plateaued near 65 in mocks. Her final scores were 84 in Listening, 74 in Reading, 80 in Speaking and 78 in Writing.
A: The panic click in Highlight Incorrect Words, spelling paralysis in Listening Fill in the Blanks, and over-analysis paralysis in Multiple-Choice, Multiple Answers.
A: If you click a word that is actually correct, you lose a point. Anu was clicking on correct words simply because an accent made them sound different, cancelling out marks earned elsewhere.
A: Place the mouse cursor at the start of the text when the audio begins, move it one word at a time at the speaker's pace, and keep your eyes on the cursor. Coordinating hand and eye anchors attention to the present word.
A: Stopping to spell one word perfectly while the speaker moves on, Anu would get one word right and leave the remaining blanks empty.
