Password / Skills Plus Practice & Vocabulary
Password / Skills Plus — free practice with graded vocabulary, dictation, intensive listening, cloze and SRS spaced repetition. An English proficiency test accepted by hundreds of UK universities. Official practice tests are paid (£40 each) and free material is almost non-existent — that's where we come in.
Three difficulty levels (L1 Foundation A1-A2, L2 Intermediate B1-B2, L3 Advanced C1-C2) across six practice modes: vocabulary, dictation, intensive listening, cloze, pronunciation and writing.
An English proficiency test accepted by hundreds of UK universities. Official practice tests are paid (£40 each) and free material is almost non-existent — that's where we come in.
Password: the UK university pre-sessional test almost no one has heard of
Password Skills (and the harder Password Skills Plus) is accepted by hundreds of UK universities as a pre-sessional English assessment. Yet outside admissions offices its public visibility is low: there are no large-scale prep books, no coaching school marketing pipelines, no influencer ecosystem. Many students discover Password only after their university nominates it as the assessment they must take for pre-sessional placement.
That obscurity is precisely the opening this tool stack tries to fill. The Password reading sections reward exactly the comprehension skills our intensive-listening and cloze tools train: rapid scanning for specific information, inferring connotation from collocation, and identifying argument structure across a paragraph. The writing assessment uses CEFR-style criteria (Task Response, Coherence, Lexis, Grammar) which our writing word counter aligns to via self-rubric — particularly the B2 essay format around 150 words.
Two structural facts about Password worth internalising. First, the test is **almost entirely receptive** at the Skills level — reading and listening — with writing added at Skills Plus. So if your weak skill is speaking, Password is structurally a kinder test than IELTS or Cambridge; if your weak skill is reading speed, it will hurt you. Second, scoring is on a CEFR-aligned 0–9 scale, but the granularity around B2 (the most common admission threshold) is finer than IELTS's half-band steps. A 5.5 vs a 6.0 on Password matters more than on IELTS.
Preparation strategy: prioritise extensive reading at your target CEFR band, dictate sentences using our intensive-listening tool to build parsing under time pressure, and for Skills Plus, write a 150-word B2 essay every other day using the word counter self-rubric. The single highest-leverage habit is **reading 30 minutes a day at exactly the level above your current band** — drop down only when you genuinely cannot follow.
Frequently asked questions
Is Password Skills the same as Password Skills Plus?
No. Skills covers reading and listening only. Skills Plus adds a writing component. Most pre-sessional placements use one or the other depending on the university — check the specific letter you received.
Where can I sit a Password test?
Password is computer-delivered and supervised by the institution that requires it — usually online with remote proctoring. There is no public test-centre network like IELTS.
Does Password results get accepted for UK visa?
Generally no — Password is for academic admission, not UKVI SELT. For visa purposes you need an SELT-listed test like IELTS UKVI or LanguageCert IESOL.