Portuguese exams explained: eight certificates, six levels

Six certificates map onto the six levels of the Common European Framework. The mapping is stated by CAPLE on each exam's own page.

ACESSO — Certificado de Acesso ao Português. A1.

CIPLE — Certificado Inicial de Português Língua Estrangeira. A2.

DEPLE — Diploma Elementar. B1.

DIPLE — Diploma Intermédio. B2.

DAPLE — Diploma Avançado. C1.

DUPLE — Diploma Universitário. C2.

Two more sit outside that ladder. TEJO is a certificate of competence rather than a rung on the scale. And there are school versions of several exams, marked with a trailing -e, whose tasks are adapted for candidates aged 12 to 15.

The naming is worth one warning. The word that changes is the type of document — certificado for the bottom two, diploma above — and the letter that changes encodes Elementar, Intermédio, Avançado, Universitário. Nothing in “DIPLE” says B2. If you are being asked for a specific certificate by a university or an employer, match the acronym exactly rather than reasoning from the name.

The non-school exams are open to anyone aged 16 or over who does not have Portuguese as a mother tongue, and CAPLE states plainly that it does not matter how or where you learnt the language. There is no course requirement and no prerequisite level — you are not required to hold CIPLE before sitting DEPLE.

The school versions exist precisely because that age floor would otherwise exclude younger candidates, and they are not an easier version of the same paper: the tasks are rewritten for 12- to 15-year-olds rather than simplified.

It is tempting to compare exams by how many components they have. For this family that comparison is meaningless, because the components are grouped differently at different levels.

ACESSO (A1) has four components: Reading Comprehension, Written Production and Interaction, Listening Comprehension, and Spoken Production and Interaction. The first three are set and marked by CAPLE at the University of Lisbon; the spoken component is assessed by the exam centre and by CAPLE, and it is video-recorded.

CIPLE (A2) has three — and it is not because something was dropped. Reading and writing are combined into a single component, “Compreensão da Leitura e Produção e Interação Escritas”, with listening and speaking as the other two.

DEPLE (B1) has four again.

So between A1 and A2 the paper count falls, and between A2 and B1 it rises, while the difficulty only ever goes up. If you are preparing, read the component list for the exact exam you registered for rather than assuming it matches the level below.

ACESSO also publishes its weightings, which is useful: Reading Comprehension is 20% of the total and Written Production and Interaction is 15%, each running 20 minutes.

Speaking is a component at every level, from A1 to C2. Not an optional add-on, not a separate exam — a scored part of the paper you register for.

That is unusual, and it is the sharpest contrast in this whole series. The JLPT has no speaking section at any level. TOPIK I and TOPIK II have none either — Korean speaking is a completely separate exam with its own fee and only three sittings a year. Two of the four other exams we have written up treat speaking as something you go and buy separately, if at all.

Portuguese does not. Which means a Portuguese candidate cannot pass by reading well, and the failure mode that catches JLPT candidates — enormous passive vocabulary, no ability to produce — is not available here.

It also means something we should say carefully, because it happens to suit us. On this exam, conversation practice is directly exam-relevant rather than adjacent to it. We sell conversation lessons, so read that with the appropriate suspicion — but check it against CAPLE's own component lists rather than against us, and note that we have said the opposite about Japanese and Korean on this same site, where it cost us to say it.

The honest limit: a teacher helps most with the two productive components, speaking and writing, because those are the ones you cannot mark yourself. Reading and listening you can score against a past paper alone, for nothing.

CAPLE refers throughout to the propina — the exam fee — and never states the amount. You register first, and the site tells you that you then have 24 hours to pay by card, and that the fee is not refundable. Miss the 24-hour window and the registration is cancelled.

So CAPLE sits with JLPT, HSK, telc, DELF / DALF, Norskprøven, Norskprøven C1, IELTS, Cambridge English and Swedex: the exams on this site whose awarding body publishes no global figure. That list is read from the comparison dataset when this page is built, not typed here — the typed version named three exams, and was stale within a week.

The practical consequence is the same each time. Any single figure you see quoted online for one of these exams is somebody's local price presented as a global one. Ask the centre you would actually sit at.

This is the genuinely unusual thing about CAPLE, and it is the reason this page exists as more than a decoder ring.

CAPLE publishes an annual statistical breakdown of the exams it administers. For 2020 it reports 3,513 exams in total — 1,766 taken in Portugal and 1,747 abroad. That is a near-perfect split: 50.3% domestic against 49.7% international.

It goes further than a headcount. The published breakdowns cover candidates by nationality, by level and sex, by age and sex, and — the one almost nobody publishes — by motivation.

None of the other exam bodies in this series publishes anything comparable. The JLPT, TOPIK, DELE and HSK all document their own rules thoroughly and say nothing about who actually sits them.

Two caveats before anyone reuses those figures. The breakdowns themselves are published as charts rather than tables, so the totals above are the numbers stated in the text and the finer splits are not machine-readable from the page. And 2020 is a pandemic year, in which international sittings were disrupted worldwide — the near-even domestic/international split may say more about that year than about a normal one. We are quoting it because it is what CAPLE publishes, not because it is a trend.

CIPLE runs in international sittings in May, July and November, and additionally in national sittings labelled CIPLE-P (CIPLE-Portugal).

That second category is the thing to check before you plan. A sitting that exists in Portugal is not automatically a sitting that exists at your centre abroad, and the calendar you want is your own exam centre's rather than the headline one. This is the same trap that catches JLPT candidates outside Japan, where many cities hold only one of the two annual sittings — a failed attempt costs twelve months rather than five.

Work out which acronym you actually need, from whoever is asking for it, and match it exactly. Then read the component list for that specific exam rather than the one below it, because the grouping changes.

Sit a timed past paper before choosing a level. Score the reading and listening yourself; get a person to look at the writing and the speaking, because those are the parts where self-assessment is worth nothing.

And nobody can promise you a pass — not a school, not an app, not a teacher, not us. Anyone wording it otherwise is selling something they do not control.