Receive a brochure containing all the latest information about The Big Challenge, plus event posters for your school.
A modern and interactive contest
This year’s contest has an improved interface, post-contest access to student answers and a greater emphasis on listening skills.
Focus on listening
More listening questions, plus a separate mark for listening comprehension.
Useful for your lessons
Access to a full analysis of your students’ answers – useful as a teaching tool.
Easy to organise
Arrange as many contest sessions as you wish, plus there’s no papers to return.
The contest demo
The best way to discover what’s in the contest is to try the demo. It shows the types of questions you can expect in the contest.
Audio to test listening skills
Understanding spoken English is an important real-world skill, which is why it’s at the heart of the online test. For authenticity, we use native English speakers in all our recordings. In addition to listening, there are also questions on reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, culture and expressions.
Participants receive an overall score and ranking, plus a separate mark for listening.
Teaching tools after the contest
The online contest gives you access to detailed statistics for each of your classes. You will be able to review your students’ performance for every question. Find out the most frequent mistakes, as well as the questions where your students reached high scores.
With a classroom projector or an interactive whiteboard, you can display the contest questions in class. This provides a great opportunity to review teaching points and learn together.
Easy to organise
The contest can be accessed by computers or tablets with an internet connection. Several contest sessions can be arranged throughout the day, if there are not enough computers/tablets for all students to take the test at the same time.
With no test papers to receive or return, organisation is very simple!
Discover what’s in the contest. Learn about the contest format, types of questions and topics tested.
FAQ
You will receive the contest link and the Big Challenge code/school code by e-mail approx. one week before the start of the competition period. The contest link is not the link to our website nor the link to our DEMO-online Version. The coordinating teacher receives the contest link and has to forward it to their students and colleagues.
Important matters to prepare befor the contest:
A detailed to-do list for preparation can also be found here (available soon). Please make sure that your students respect the following rules:
Follow this link to find help if your students are experiencing technical difficulties.
The competition consists of 55 questions, for which the students have 45 minutes to answer. For each question there are four possible answers to choose from and the task is to choose the only correct one.
The 55 questions cover vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, cultural questions and listening comprehension by embedding image and audio sequences. There are three degrees of question difficulty: easy, medium and hard for which the students can earn 4 points, 5 points or 6 points. The value of the question is shown on the upper right corner of the screen.
For each correct answer there is a corresponding score. If the student gives an incorrect answer, the points of that question are not awareded and he or she loses a quarter of the value of that question. If no answer is given, the question is awarded 0 points. In order to avoid a negative or zero score, the score obtained by adding the total number of points earned by the student is increased by 85 points. Students’ scores will thus range from 18.75 to 350 points.
You can find all the information about the grading process in our contest rules 'The Day of the contest' > 'Scores'.
Questions from previous tests are published on our website as well as a DEMO-Version to see what the competition looks like and test ones network.
There are five levels of The Big Challenge contest:
The questionnaires are developed according to the level corresponding to the student's class. We refer to both the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) and class textbooks when writing the questions.
Level Big Challenge Levels CEFR
Level 1 | A1 > A1+ | |
Level 2 | A1+ > A2 | |
Level 3 | A2 | |
Level 4 | A2 > A2+ | |
Level 5 | B1 |
If you have any questions about which level your students should take, please get in touch and we will be happy to assist:
E-Mail: benelux@thebigchallenge.com / Phone: +32 2 588 23 78 OR +31 85 888 3364
You will receive the contest link and the Big Challenge code/school code by e-mail approx. one week before the start of the competition period. The contest link is not the link to our website nor the link to our DEMO-online Version. The coordinating teacher receives the contest link and has to forward it to their students and colleagues.
Click on this link to find all the information about what needs to be prepared for the competition.
Your students will need a computer, a tablet (at least 9 inches) or a smartphone with an Internet connection, as well as a headset or headphones so that they do not disturb each other during the listening comprehension.
If you do not have enough headphones, you can either ask the students to bring their own or you can download the audio files in your account and play them one by one for everyone during the competition.
Please use at least Chrome 35, Firefox 35, Safari 11, Internet Explorer 11 or a later version. Older Browsers may experience display problems.
Receive a brochure containing all the latest information about The Big Challenge, plus event posters for your school.