Are spelling mistakes penalised in the Listening paper?
A. For the ILEC Listening paper, the spelling of answers generally has to be correct. Some minor variations are allowed, however, as long as the meaning remains completely clear, especially in words that present spelling problems to native speakers of English. An example of such a word is ‘accommodation’. All the tasks for the Cambridge ESOL ILEC papers are pretested before being put on to live papers. If it is found at pretesting that a key is problematic from a spelling point of view, the question is changed.
