About ChaminduI failed PTEbefore I ever taught it

It started badly

I'm a chartered engineer. That's my profession, and it still is — I work full time, and I lecture at the University of Moratuwa and ITUM.

A few years ago I needed 79 in PTE for my own migration. I sat it, and I got 75. Speaking: 70.

That number made no sense to me. I use English every day at work. I lecture in it. I'd been speaking it since school. And a computer had just told me my speaking was the weakest thing about me.

I could have practised harder. Most people do — they book another date, do a few hundred more questions, and hope. I'm an engineer, so I did what engineers do when a system produces an output they don't understand. I went and studied the system.

What I found

I took the official E2 Language course. Then Macquarie University's preparation program. Then Pearson's own teacher pathway — the training they give to the people who teach this exam.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, it clicked.

PTE isn't really testing your English. It's testing whether you understand what its scoring is looking for.

That sounds like a small distinction. It isn't. It changes everything about how you should prepare — what to practise, what to ignore, and why the advice most people are following is quietly costing them marks.

I sat the exam again and scored 90 out of 90.

Then I sat it again. And again. Every time I've taken it since, including after Pearson changed their scoring, I've scored 90. That's the part that matters to me — not the first 90, but the fact that it repeats. A score you can get once might be luck. A score you can get every time is a method.

How the teaching started

I wasn't planning to teach. Friends and colleagues started asking how I'd done it, and I found I enjoyed explaining it.

So I ran a one-day online workshop on Speaking. I charged 4,900 rupees, mostly because charging nothing felt strange. Ten people paid. A few colleagues came for free.

It went well enough that I ran another. Then another. Dozens of them, and about thirty students came through.

Then someone asked whether I'd teach the whole exam, not just Speaking. My first full course had five students.

Where we are now

These days more than a hundred people ask to join every month.

I take fifty.

That isn't false scarcity, and it costs me real money every single month. It's simply the number where I can still see every student — read their practice, hear their recordings, and know who's struggling before they tell me. Past that, students become names on a list, and the whole thing I built stops working.

The rest wait for the next batch. Some of them aren't happy about it. I'd rather have that problem than the other one.

Why we built a centre

After a few thousand students, you learn what people actually need — as opposed to what's easy to sell them.

What they need is to practise properly before it counts. Not on a laptop at the kitchen table with earphones in, but in a room that feels like the real thing: an individual workstation, a proper headset, a timer running, and someone talking beside you.

Nobody in Sri Lanka was offering that. So we built it. Our centre on High Level Road in Nawinna has an exam room set up to the same standard as a real test centre, and our students sit a full mock in it before they sit the real one.

That's the whole idea behind everything here. Find out what actually moves the score, then build whatever it takes to deliver it.

— Chamindu