The English érettségi speaking exam

Középszint: 15 minutes, 33 points

Three tasks, with very little preparation time. The examiner works from pre-planned questions, and you are given a written description for the situational task.

• Conversation - the examiner leads, on your own life, surroundings, and everyday activities, focused on one topic. No preparation time.
• Role play - an everyday transactional situation with the examiner as your partner. You get a written description of the situation, the roles, and the goal, and roughly half a minute to think.
• Independent topic presentation - you present your thoughts on an everyday topic, supported by verbal or visual prompts such as photographs or drawings, with follow-up questions. Roughly half a minute to prepare.

Emelt szint: 20 minutes, 30 points

The same three-part shape, on less routine and more abstract ground. The middle task is the one that changes.

• Conversation - non-routine and more abstract topics. You do not receive a ticket sheet, and there is no preparation time.
• Argumentation - you argue for or against a provocative statement and respond to the examiner arguing back, supported by three or four short prompts. Up to half a minute to think.
• Independent topic presentation - extended, coherent development of a broader topic, with verbal or visual support that can include graphs. Up to half a minute to think.

The difference that actually matters

At középszint the middle task is a role play: you and the examiner are on the same side of a transaction, and the examiner helps it along. At emelt szint that becomes an argumentation task where the examiner argues back. This is the single biggest step between the levels in the oral exam.

It is also the part that cannot be prepared by memorising material. You can rehearse topic vocabulary for the presentation task. You cannot rehearse a counter-argument you have not heard yet, which is why this task rewards having practised disagreeing in English rather than having revised a topic list.

The other emelt szint addition is visual data. The presentation task can be supported by graphs, which asks for a vocabulary of description and trend that the középszint version, working from photographs, does not require.

How it is assessed

The oral exam is assessed against a centrally developed analytic scale, and the tasks are assessed independently of each other. That independence is worth knowing: a weak first task does not follow you into the third.

This page does not publish a per-criterion point breakdown. Figures circulate online, but no current official scale could be verified for either level, and a wrong breakdown would send you into the exam optimising for the wrong thing.