Practise all three tests: reading comprehension and written expression on the 90-minute format, and an oral that rehearses the A to C question ladder as recorded answers. Reading and writing end on a letter from the PSC bands, the oral on one overall level, and your three letters make a profile like CBC.
The questions are in French and everything around them is in English: instructions, explanations and your report. Sit a full mock exam, with reading and writing on the 90-minute format, or start with a quick test that follows the unsupervised internet version.
Quick tests top out at C, as on the unsupervised internet tests, and the oral quick test is on Premium. Every question of a quick test is explained in review, and the free full mock explains the first missed question of each test.
One of each kind you meet most: a workplace text with one question, the statement that best describes a sentence, and a written expression item where you find the bold section with an error. Four options, numbered (1) to (4), as on the real test.
The full reading test has 60 questions and the written expression test 65, each on a 90-minute clock. Start with a free quick test and see your level.
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Two free quick tests in reading (25 questions, 45 minutes) or writing (30 questions, 45 minutes). Then one free full mock exam of all three tests: 60 reading questions, 65 writing questions and an 11-question oral.
A letter for each test: from the PSC bands in reading and writing, one overall level in the oral. Then your profile in the order reading, writing, oral. The free mock explains the first question you missed in each test. Premium adds the full review: every question explained, feedback on each oral answer and what the next level needs.
The free account gives you two quick tests and one full mock exam of all three tests, with your level on every test. Premium explains every question and opens each full test on its own and the oral quick test.
Enough to find out which letter you would land on today.
CA$0
For the weeks before your test, when you need to know what to fix.
Prices in Canadian dollars; tax is calculated at checkout. Six and twelve month plans are in the app. Each plan covers the SLE and every other exam on Mocko, and every plan starts with the same free account, so you can try the quick tests and the full mock first.
Yes, to start. A free account includes two quick tests, in reading comprehension (25 questions in 45 minutes) or written expression (30 questions in 45 minutes), with every question explained in review. It also includes one full mock exam of all three tests: reading (60 questions, 90 minutes), written expression (65 questions, 90 minutes) and the recorded oral (11 questions). The mock report gives a level for each test, your reading and writing scores and your profile, such as CBC, and its review explains the first missed question of each test; the other questions are explained on Premium. No credit card is needed.
Reading and writing follow the published format: 60 and 65 multiple-choice questions on a 90-minute clock, with the same question types, the questions in French and the screens around them in English. The real test scores 50 and 55 of those questions and leaves 10 unmarked pilot items; Mocko marks every question, converts your result to the 50 and 55-point scales and applies the published bands. The quick tests follow the unsupervised internet versions, so their top level is C. The oral is different by design: the real Oral Language Assessment is a live conversation with an assessor, and the Mocko oral is a recorded rehearsal of the same climb from level A to level C questions.
Each recorded answer is transcribed and rated automatically on five areas: fluency, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and whether it answers the question asked. The whole set then gets one overall level, X, A, B, C or E, the way the PSC gives one global rating: the highest level whose questions you handle well across your answers. A question you leave unanswered counts as not achieved. The oral quick test, on Premium, has 4 questions and its top level is C.
No. A Mocko level is a practice level, not a PSC result, and it cannot fill a letter in a linguistic profile: only PSC-approved second language evaluation tests can. Use it to find out where you stand and what to work on before the real test.
Yes. On the SLE French, the instructions around each test, the explanations and your report are in English, and the questions themselves are in French, as on the real test.
Premium opens quick tests and full mock exams beyond the free ones, each full test on its own (reading, writing or the oral) and the oral quick test (4 questions). Every review explains every question, each oral answer gets feedback with corrected sentences, and your report shows what the next level needs from you. Plans are CA$19.99 a week, CA$39.99 a month or CA$89.89 every 3 months, and each one covers the SLE and every other exam on Mocko. Cancel anytime.
No. Mocko is an independent practice platform, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Public Service Commission of Canada. Its SLE practice items are original items created to the published format, never real SLE questions: PSC test content is Protected.
The Second Language Evaluation, or évaluation de langue seconde, is how the Public Service Commission of Canada decides whether you can hold a bilingual federal job. Three separate tests, three letters on a job poster, and one of them, the oral, is the reason most people are reading this page. Here is what each test actually contains, what separates a B from a C when you open your mouth, and how validity, retests and rescores really work.
Every figure below comes from the Public Service Commission of Canada or the Treasury Board Qualification Standards in Relation to Official Languages, checked in September 2026. The SLE runs in both directions, English and French. This guide covers the French version. For the English SLE, read our French-language guide, Test ELS d’anglais.
| Who runs it | The Public Service Commission of Canada (PSC). In French, the évaluation de langue seconde (ELS). |
| What it certifies | Second official language proficiency for a bilingual federal position. Not an immigration or citizenship test. |
| Number of tests | Three, sat separately: Reading Comprehension, Written Expression, Oral Language Assessment. |
| Levels | A (basic), B (intermediate), C (advanced), plus X (below A) and E (indefinite exemption from retesting). |
| Reading | 60 multiple-choice questions, 50 scored, 90 minutes supervised. Unsupervised version: 25 questions, 45 minutes. |
| Writing | 65 multiple-choice questions, 55 scored, 90 minutes supervised. Unsupervised version: 30 questions, 45 minutes. No essay. |
| Oral | 20 to 40 minutes including instructions, live on Microsoft Teams with a PSC-certified assessor, camera on. |
| Pass mark | None. Each position carries a linguistic profile, and you meet it skill by skill or you do not. |
| Validity | Five years if the 30-day retest period was respected, then indefinitely for the position you hold, unless its profile is raised above your level. An E never expires. |
| Retest waiting period | 30 calendar days per test. Sit it sooner and the result is void, and the clock restarts. |
| Who accepts it | Federal departments and agencies. Results are held centrally by the PSC and are portable across the public service. |
| Fee | You cannot pay to be tested. The organisation that orders the test covers it, at prices listed only on the PSC extranet. |
| CEFR or NCLC equivalence | None published. The Qualification Standards define A, B and C with their own descriptors and map to no other scale. |
Anyone being appointed to a bilingual position in the federal public service has to prove proficiency in their second official language, and the Appointment Policy allows only PSC-approved SLE tests to do it. That covers two very different people: the public servant who wants to move up into a CBC job, and the member of the public who applied to a bilingual posting on the GC Jobs site. Both take the same tests, and neither books them personally.
A bilingual position carries a three-letter profile, and the order never changes: reading comprehension, then written expression, then oral communication. So a CBC position needs level C in reading, level B in writing and level C in oral. BBB needs level B in all three. Where a skill is not required at all, the profile shows a dash in its place, as in B-B. The highest profile a bilingual position can carry is CCC. The levels are cumulative: someone at level C can do level A and level B tasks too.
If you are in a selection process, the hiring organisation arranges the test. If you want to be tested for any other reason, you go through your manager and your HR division. Public servants, including members of the Canadian Armed Forces, cannot book a test directly with the PSC. Meeting your position’s profile is also what makes you eligible for the bilingualism bonus, an annual payment of $800 under the National Joint Council directive, provided your deputy head certifies that you hold SLE results matching the profile.
Members of the public sit exactly the same tests, but only by invitation from the HR team of a federal organisation, and only after applying to a bilingual position. You cannot be tested in anticipation of future employment. One route worth knowing: a non-imperative appointment lets a person take the job first and reach the required levels within two years, with language training at public expense.
The first correction to make: the Test of Oral Proficiency, the TOP that older guides and half the forum threads still name, no longer exists. It was replaced on 6 April 2021 by the Oral Language Assessment, which runs on Microsoft Teams. The reading and writing tests kept their names and are still multiple choice.
Tests 633 and 634 · 60 multiple-choice questions, 90 minutes
What is being judged. Level B wants the main idea, specific details and the difference between a main and a secondary idea. Level C adds inference, fine points of meaning and comfort with specialised or unfamiliar material.
Test 654 · 65 multiple-choice questions, 90 minutes
What is being judged. This surprises anyone who prepared by drafting briefing notes. Nothing is composed. What is tested is whether you recognise the correct form, the right register and the right connector when four plausible options sit side by side.
Replaced the Test of Oral Proficiency on 6 April 2021 · 20 to 40 minutes on Microsoft Teams, camera on
What is being judged. Your result is a global judgement of sustained performance across the whole conversation, not a total of task scores. Losing your train of thought, pausing to think, not knowing an answer and making mistakes are all listed by the PSC as things that do not affect your rating.
This is the section that decides most careers, so it is worth reading the official descriptors rather than a coaching school’s paraphrase. Below is what the PSC publishes for each level, split into what you can do and how you sound doing it.
The jump from B to C is not about accuracy. Read the two descriptors again. Level B already tolerates miscommunication and visible planning pauses; level C still tolerates errors, as long as they rarely cause misunderstanding. What changes is the kind of language asked of you. Level B lives on concrete topics: describe, explain, compare alternatives. Level C moves to complex and abstract ones and adds four demands that B never makes: a detailed description of something complicated, a summary of a discussion, an opinion you can hold and defend across several turns, and an answer to a hypothetical. Candidates who fail at C usually speak accurate, clean, short French. They lose the level on sustained discourse and on the conditional, not on grammar drills.
There is no pass mark in the way a commercial exam has one. You get a letter, and your department compares it to the position’s profile. Five outcomes exist: X, below level A; A, B and C; and E, an indefinite exemption from further testing in that skill. Reading and writing convert a raw score into a letter using published bands.
| Test | X | A | B | C | E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reading, supervised (tests 633 and 634)50 scored items | 0 to 17 | 18 to 27 | 28 to 37 | 38 to 44 | 45 to 50 |
| Writing, supervised (test 654)55 scored items | 0 to 19 | 20 to 30 | 31 to 42 | 43 to 51 | 52 to 55 |
| Reading, unsupervised internet test25 items | 0 to 8 | 9 to 13 | 14 to 18 | 19 to 25 | Not available |
| Writing, unsupervised internet test30 items | 0 to 10 | 11 to 16 | 17 to 23 | 24 to 30 | Not available |
The Oral Language Assessment has no score band. The assessor gives a global evaluation of your sustained performance and records a letter. You cannot obtain an E on an unsupervised internet test, whatever you score.
Enter a reading or writing score on the PSC scale: out of 50 or 55 for the supervised tests, out of 25 or 30 for the unsupervised internet tests. It opens on the example result above.
No score yet? Take a free SLE French quick test and your report gives you the letter.
For the oral, the test centre sends your result to you and to the departmental contact within five business days, followed by a feedback report that is general rather than diagnostic. For unsupervised reading and writing tests, results appear under My Tests in the Candidate Assessment Tool 48 hours after the deadline date in your invitation. For supervised tests, the organisation that ordered the test passes the result on.
A rescore exists only for the oral assessment: request it in writing within 10 business days through the HR officer who ordered the test, and a second assessor rates the recording blind. Online reading and writing tests cannot be rescored, because the system applies the key automatically. If conditions were unfavourable, you can ask the organisation that scheduled you for a retest instead.
A retest can cost you the level you have. A valid new result replaces the previous one in the PSC system, in either direction. The same applies after a rescore: whether the second rating is higher, lower or identical, it becomes the official result. If you already hold the level your position needs, think twice before sitting the test again to chase a C.
There is no registration page, no session calendar and no fee. Testing is by invitation only, and the PSC states plainly that no mechanism exists for a candidate, public servant or not, to pay to be tested. Only the organisation that booked your appointment can move or cancel it.
Assessment accommodation: tell the person who scheduled your test as soon as possible. For PSC tests, only the Commission’s Personnel Psychology Centre can determine accommodation measures, and requests are submitted by HR through the Assessment Accommodation Request System.
The PSC says no special preparation is required for the oral assessment. That is true of the format and untrue of the French. You cannot rehearse the questions, but you can rehearse the four things level C demands that level B does not, and you can stop wasting weeks on the wrong skill.
The PSC publishes self-assessment tests for reading and written expression, online and as PDF booklets with answer keys, plus sample questions of both item types. Sit them first: they tell you roughly which letter you would land on today. The results are unofficial and cannot be used in a selection process, which is exactly what makes them safe to use.
Then sit our free SLE French sample test (PDF)Both are multiple choice, and nothing you write is marked. The useful drill is noticing why three of four options are wrong: a register too familiar for a note to a director, a connector that reverses the logic, an agreement that does not match. Read the kind of French the test uses, which is to say emails, memos, bulletins and extracts from reports.
Speak about your own job in French for ten uninterrupted minutes at a time, out loud. Build a bank of hypotheticals about your file and answer them in the conditional. Practise summarising a meeting. Practise holding an opinion for three turns instead of one sentence. And practise being interrupted, because the assessor will redirect you.
The Mocko SLE French practice is built on the published format, with original practice items and never PSC content. Reading comprehension and written expression run on the 90-minute clock with the same question types. The review explains every question of the free quick tests and the first missed question of each test in the free full mock exam, and Premium explains them all. The oral is a recorded rehearsal of the A to C question ladder: there is no assessor, but the questions climb the same way, from your routine to opinions and hypotheticals, and your answers are rated to one overall level. Your result is a practice level, not a PSC result.
Start with a free quick testA TEF or TCF certificate does not count. TEF and TCF are different exams, graded on the CEFR and converted to the NCLC scale for immigration. They are not accepted in place of the SLE. The Appointment Policy allows only PSC-approved second language evaluation tests to assess second official language proficiency, and alternative assessment methods for oral proficiency ended on 1 October 2025.
Related reading: the PSC self-assessment tests for the official free material, which language test for Express Entry if you are also weighing an immigration test, and the Mocko blog for French exam guides.
Avoid anything selling real SLE questions. PSC test content is designated Protected, the Commission monitors the web for reproductions of its assessment tools, and disclosing or using improperly obtained test content can lead to an investigation under the Public Service Employment Act. A site advertising authentic SLE items is telling you it is a liability, not an advantage.
The Second Language Evaluation, or évaluation de langue seconde, is the set of three tests the Public Service Commission of Canada uses to measure second official language proficiency for bilingual federal positions: reading comprehension, written expression and oral communication, each graded A, B or C.
The three letters are always in the same order: reading comprehension, then written expression, then oral communication. CBC means level C in reading, level B in writing and level C in oral. Where a skill is not required, the profile shows a dash instead of a letter, for example B-B. The highest profile a bilingual position can carry is CCC.
No. The Appointment Policy allows only PSC-approved second language evaluation tests to assess second official language proficiency, aside from the separate P code for specialised proficiency, and alternative assessment methods for oral proficiency ended on 1 October 2025. A DELF, TEF or TCF certificate proves your French for other purposes, but it cannot fill a letter in a linguistic profile.
Five years, provided you respected the 30-day retest period. After that the result stays valid indefinitely for the position you already hold, as long as its linguistic profile is not raised above your level. For a new appointment, results older than five years generally do not count, with a few documented exceptions. An E never expires.
There is a 30-calendar-day waiting period for each test. If you sit it again before the period is over, the result is not valid and a new 30-day period starts from your most recent test date.
Yes. A valid new result replaces the previous result recorded by the Public Service Commission, whether it is higher or lower. That is also true after a rescore of the oral assessment: the second rating becomes the official one even if it comes out below the first.
No. Tests are scheduled only by the human resources team of a federal organisation, after you apply to a bilingual position, or through your manager if you are already a public servant. Public servants, including members of the Canadian Armed Forces, cannot book directly with the PSC.
Nothing to you. The organisation that orders the test pays for it, and the PSC states there is no mechanism for a candidate to pay to be tested. Its price list for departments sits on an extranet that is not public, so there is no candidate-facing fee to quote.
E stands for exemption: your performance met the level C requirements and you are expected to keep level C indefinitely, so the PSC exempts you from further testing in that skill. On reading and writing it is a score band above C; on the oral assessment it is the assessor’s judgement. You cannot get an E on an unsupervised internet test.
X means your performance did not meet the minimum requirements for level A. It is not a proficiency level, and it is recorded like any other result.
The Public Service Commission records the Oral Language Assessment for administrative purposes and keeps the recording for two years. You can request a rescore in writing within 10 business days of the results being sent, through the departmental HR officer who requested the test. A second assessor listens to the recording and rates it without knowing the original result.
Only for reading comprehension and written expression. The PSC publishes free self-assessment tests and sample questions for those two, and states that the unofficial results cannot be used in a selection process. There is no official practice version of the Oral Language Assessment. Any site selling "real SLE questions" is a warning sign: test content is Protected, the PSC monitors the web for it, and disclosure can trigger an investigation under the Public Service Employment Act.
Formats, bands and policies on this page were checked against canada.ca in September 2026. The PSC updates its pages without notice, so confirm anything time-sensitive with the organisation that scheduled your test.
Guides to the other language certificates joining Mocko, with the format, the levels and what each one is accepted for.
You cannot book the real test, but you can rehearse it. Start with a free quick test in reading or writing, then sit a free full mock exam of all three tests and see your profile, letter by letter.
