Celpe-Bras Practice Test: Try the Full Written Exam Online

On Celpe-Bras, the real enemy isn't vocabulary — it's time. Four texts, four different genres, three hours, and no right to stop partway through. You can write a leisurely reader's letter and then get stuck summarizing an article — the exam won't warn you it's happening. The only reliable way to find out whether you can actually keep the pace is to live through the whole thing once before the real day, not piece by piece.

Why drilling tasks one at a time falls short

Practicing tasks in isolation — one letter here, one summary there — teaches you the genre, but not the exam. Parte Escrita doesn't just grade grammar; it grades the link between text genre, audience, and purpose. The same event gets written up differently in a reader's letter, a social media post, and a formal e-mail — a different form of address, a different sentence length, a different register. On the real exam these four genres run back to back, and switching registers mid-session is its own skill — one that scattered, single-task practice simply never trains.

Then there's stamina. Four tarefas in a row aren't four separate exercises — they're a three-hour marathon where your focus by the third text isn't what it was at the start, and by the fourth it's easy to start cutting corners on structure simply because you're tired. Whether you have enough time left for the genre that gives you the most trouble, and whether you'll still have gas left for the last two tasks, is something you can only find out on a full run — a rough guess almost always turns out wrong.

And here's the part that matters most: the written-section score is the average of all four tarefas, and the certificate's overall level is pulled down by whichever half is weaker — written or oral — with no compensation from the stronger one. A weak spot in one genre can't hide behind strong ones elsewhere; it has to be found and fixed ahead of time, and that takes an honest full run, not selective practice on your favorite genres.

What the Mnezo practice test actually is

Under "Exams" in Mnezo you'll find a full run of the written section — Parte Escrita — built to match the real Celpe-Bras format: four original tarefas, each with its own provoking stimulus and its own text genre, exactly like the real exam. The tasks are written by us in the spirit of recent editions, not copied from them — INEP's exam materials are copyrighted, and we don't reproduce them.

• Tarefa 1 — from a video. You watch a short news clip and write a text in the required genre — a reader's letter or a blog post, say — addressed to a specific reader. Tip: watch the clip no more than twice; the real exam won't let you replay it endlessly either.
• Tarefa 2 — from audio. Same logic, but the starting point is a radio report or an interview instead of a video.
• Tarefa 3 and 4 — from printed texts. You read a text — a news item or an article — and write your own: an opinion note, a summary for colleagues, or something similar, depending on the task.

The video and audio tasks each draw from a pool of several stimulus variants, so the practice test doesn't show you the same clip every time — a second run doesn't turn into recall from memory. Just like on the real exam, every task has a minimum and a maximum word count: too short and it doesn't count, too long isn't rewarded either — you're meant to write to the point, not pad the word count for safety.

The whole run happens in a proctored session with one 180-minute timer. You can’t pause it: once you start, the countdown runs, tasks unlock one at a time with no going back to a previous one, and you can’t paste text into the answer field — only type it yourself, the way you’d handwrite it on paper. As in the exam, you can watch the task 1 video exactly twice. Otherwise the real exam works a little differently: tarefa 1 has a fixed 30 minutes including the viewings, and after the task 2 audio has played twice you divide the remaining two and a half hours yourself and may go back to earlier texts. Ours is stricter — deliberately inconvenient, because that discipline is the whole point of taking the practice test rather than just reading about the format.

Once you submit, each text gets AI feedback in the language you use the app in. As in the exam, it’s one overall score, not a sum of criterion points: the AI checks whether the task is done in the right genre for the right reader, whether the source is used accurately and in your own words, and whether the text holds together — and it lists the language errors separately, with corrections. The score comes with an estimated Celpe-Bras level. The feedback isn’t an official exam score — it’s a pointer to what’s holding your text back and where to put your prep time before the real attempt.

Parte Oral — the oral section — isn't part of the practice test: a live conversation with two examiners around elementos provocadores can't be honestly simulated solo. That side of your prep is worth building separately, with a teacher or a speaking partner — Mnezo's practice test covers exactly the written section, the part you can train alone and at your own pace.

One more honest caveat: the trainer doesn’t hand you a “correct answer” — just like the real exam, Parte Escrita tarefas have no single model text, only level descriptions. So the AI feedback isn’t built by comparing your answer to a sample; it follows the same holistic logic raters use: how consistently the text carries out the task in the required genre. Treat it as a guide for self-study, not a guarantee of your score on the real exam.

How to fold the practice test into your prep

A sensible plan isn't one run the last week — it's two, with review time between them.

First run — 6 to 8 weeks before the exam, as a diagnostic. The goal isn't to score well; it's to see your current level honestly: which genres come easily, where you're short on vocabulary, whether you can finish four texts in three hours at all. After the run, the AI feedback will show what holds your texts back most — and that’s what you work on next: if it’s the language, focus on grammar and vocabulary; if it’s cohesion, work on paragraph structure and connectors; if it’s genre and audience, practice breaking down the command from its first lines.

Between the two runs, it's worth working through real past exams — the UFRGS acervo collects past editais and materials by year, and it's a good way to see the exam's actual wording and texts (more on that in our separate article on past papers) — and to write a little at a time on your own, rather than in one more marathon.

Second run — 2 to 3 weeks before the exam date. By this point, the weak spot from the first run should be noticeably stronger, and the second run confirms that under full timing — and shows whether anything still needs tuning in the weeks that remain. If the second run again shows a time shortage on one specific genre, drill that genre's timing specifically, not the whole format again — the other three are likely solid by now.

Between the runs themselves, an error log works better than trying to hold it all in your head: after each review, write down two or three specific things that came out weakest — not "grammar is shaky" in general, but "I mix up pretérito perfeito and imperfeito in past narratives" or "I forget the polite opening formula in a formal e-mail." Those specific notes are exactly what you'll be able to check against on the second run — gone, or still there.

What else to add to your prep

The practice test trains format and stamina, but it should sit alongside three other pillars. First — understanding the exam's structure and scoring — how the níveis, the written part, and the oral part connect, and why the weaker of the two pulls the final result down. Next — an overview of Celpe-Bras — where to start preparing and who needs the certificate versus who just benefits from having it. And if you're short on registration dates and deadlines for the current cycle, the exam's official page covers 2026 registration windows and fees.

It's also worth keeping the Celpe core deck active in the trainer alongside the practice test — an A1–B1 word set that shows up most often in the written section's tasks and in the practice test's own tarefas: without that base vocabulary, even a well understood writing strategy won't save a text.