What does the test look like?

The competition consists of 55 questions, for which the students have 45 minutes to answer. For each question there are four possible answers to choose from and the task is to choose the only correct one.

The 55 questions cover vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, cultural questions and listening comprehension by embedding image and audio sequences. There are three degrees of question difficulty: easy, medium and hard for which the students can earn 4 points, 5 points or 6 points. The value of the question is shown on the upper right corner of the screen.

For each correct answer there is a corresponding score. If the student gives an incorrect answer, the points of that question are not awareded and he or she loses a quarter of the value of that question. If no answer is given, the question is awarded 0 points. In order to avoid a negative or zero score, the score obtained by adding the total number of points earned by the student is increased by 85 points. Students’ scores will thus range from 18.75 to 350 points.

You can find all the information about the grading process in our contest rules 'The Day of the contest' > 'Scores'.

Questions from previous tests are published on our website as well as a DEMO-Version to see what the competition looks like and test ones network. 

There are five levels of The Big Challenge contest:

The questionnaires are developed according to the level corresponding to the student's class. We refer to both the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) and class textbooks when writing the questions.

Level Big Challenge Levels                        CEFR

If you have any questions about which level your students should take, please get in touch and we will be happy to assist:

E-Mail: benelux@thebigchallenge.com / Phone: +32 2 588 23 78 OR +31 85 888 3364