Part A20 questions
78%
Students get 15 or 16 right.
This is the easy part. Almost everyone is fine here.
OET Reading: Where are you losing marks?
You need 350 to pass. Half the students are on the line or under it. Almost all of them lose the marks in the same place: Reading Part C.
Read the reportOET HQ sample. Not worldwide OET statistics.
The big number
out of every 100 first attempts failed.
OET gives you a score from 0 to 500. Every registration body wants a B. A B starts at 350.
We looked at about 5,000 results. 47 out of 100 students got less than 350 on their first try.
Think of 100 students standing in a line. Lowest score on the left, highest score on the right. The student in the middle got 350. Not safely above the line. Right on it.
One question more, you pass. One question less, you pay for the exam again.
Where the students are
We put every student into one of four groups. Groups 1 and 2 failed. Groups 3 and 4 passed.
26 out of 100 students. Far from passing.
21 out of 100 students. Very close. Still failed.
45 out of 100 students. Passed. Most of them just barely.
7 out of 100 students. Passed easily. Only 2 got 450 or more.
Look at group 2. 21 out of 100 students got 300 to 340. Some of them are only 1 question away from passing. These students did not fail the exam. They failed ONE part of it. The next section shows you which part.
Where the marks are lost
Here is how many questions a normal student gets right in each part of Reading.
Students get 15 or 16 right.
This is the easy part. Almost everyone is fine here.
Students get 3 or 4 right.
Only 6 questions, but students lose half of them without noticing.
Students get 6 or 7 right.
This is where the exam is lost.
Put the three parts together and you can see how a fail happens. A student does well in Part A. Okay in Part B. Then loses more than half of Part C. And Part C is 16 marks out of 42. That is where the 300 to 340 group comes from. Sit one real Part C and see for yourself.
The other number
students cleared our Clearance Mocks, then sat the real exam.
of them passed. We counted from the result cards they sent us.
passed. About 3 out of 4. We rounded down, not up.
Most students sit right on the pass line. The students who cleared the Clearance Mocks before booking did not. 837 out of 1,100 passed.
We call this The Clearance Rule. The same number is on the results page and the Clearance Mocks page. Same count, same number, everywhere.
Important: this is not 1,100 students who joined our course. This is 1,100 students who cleared the mocks first. That is the whole point.
Method
The 2026 OET Difficulty Report
We checked about 5,000 real OET results. January 2025 to September 2026. We show you every number and how we got it.
By Dr. Nasir Bukhari, OET trained teacher, founder of OET HQ by CliniVerba
This report cannot tell you. One Reading paper at 2026 difficulty can. It takes about one hour. Do it before you pay another exam fee to find out the hard way.