One point short
Picture the result you have been refreshing for three weeks. Listening and reading land where you hoped. Speaking comes back one point under the level your immigration plan needs.
Until this autumn, a result like that came with a small, stubborn hope: ask for it to be marked again. For anyone who sits the TCF Canada from 1 September 2026, that hope is off the table.
France Éducation international (FEI), the French public body that runs the test, puts it at the top of its TCF Canada page: from the sessions of 1 September 2026, requests to re-mark (“recorrection”) the speaking and writing tests are no longer accepted, for about a year. Listening and reading were never part of it; they are multiple-choice and read by machine.
Most of what has been written about this treats it as a door slammed shut. I want to argue something a little different:
- The door was narrower than people remember.
- The marking behind it is sturdier than they fear.
- The real change is not to what happens after your exam. It is to how you should decide when to sit it.
A pause, not an ending
Start with the word everyone uses: ended. FEI does not use it. Lower on the same page it calls the scheme “temporarily suspended”, to improve its tools and make the handling of requests smoother, and it says the service is planned to resume in autumn 2027.
- From 1 September 2026 · 12 monthsSessions from this date: no requests to re-mark speaking or writing.
- Autumn 2027 · 3 monthsFEI plans to restart the service. No exact date is given.
That distinction is not pedantry. A pause tells you FEI is fixing a process that was struggling, not passing judgement on candidates who used it.
It also tells you not to plan around its return. “Autumn 2027” has no day attached, and a year is longer than most people’s entire preparation. If your deadline is an Express Entry draw or a citizenship file, assume the pause covers you.
You were always marked twice
Here is the part I wish more candidates knew, because it takes the sting out of the fear that one tired examiner now decides your future. Nobody marks your TCF alone.
- First marked by the examiner in the room, trained and approved by FEI, who records the interview.
- The recording then goes to a second marker, also trained by FEI.
- Marked twice the same way by FEI’s own team.
- When two marks are far apart, a third marking is always done.
- On computer, the first reading may come from FIDELIA, an automated marking aid FEI has built; the second stays human.
FEI says the two marks are made independently and blind: neither knows what the other gave.
What has been taken away
So what exactly has been taken away? Not a second opinion: you already get one, before you ever see your result. What is gone is the chance to run that whole careful process a second time on the same performance.
I won’t pretend that is nothing. If you were genuinely misjudged, the route to putting it right is now longer. But the honest picture is that the mark you receive has already been argued over by two people who could not see each other’s work. Treating it as a coin toss you can re-flip was always the weaker strategy.
The point you cannot buy back
If the marking is sound, why does the suspension still bite? Because of how thin the bands are. Speaking and writing are marked out of 20, and FEI’s own table turns those marks into the NCLC levels IRCC reads.
| NCLC | Speaking (out of 20) | Writing (out of 20) |
|---|---|---|
| 10+ | 16–20 | 16–20 |
| 9 | 14–15 | 14–15 |
| 8 | 12–13 | 12–13 |
| 7 | 10–11 | 10–11 |
| 6 | 7–9 | 7–9 |
| 5 | 6 | 6 |
| 4 | 4–5 | 4–5 |
Look at the lines that matter to most people:
- A 9 is NCLC 6; a 10 is NCLC 7.
- A 6 is NCLC 5; a 5 is NCLC 4.
Below NCLC 10, every band is one to three points wide. That is the gap a nervous minute in Tâche 2 or a rushed third essay can open, and it is exactly where re-marking used to be asked for.
The margin you once looked for after the exam now has to be built before it.
This is where I part company with the usual advice to “aim for the level you need”. Aim for the level you need is how you end up one point short.
The target for a first sitting, now, is a point or two above your threshold, so that an ordinary bad day still leaves you on the right side.
Stop sitting it to see
The habit I think this rule should end, more than any other, is booking the TCF to find out where you stand. It is a common plan: sit early, look at the result, re-mark or retake as needed. Half of that plan has just gone, and the half that remains is slower than it looks.
- between two sittings of the TCF Canada
- 20 days
- for results, from FEI receiving the session’s papers
- 15 working days
- the certificate is valid, from the date results are issued
- 2 years
FEI allows as many sittings as you like, with 20 days between two sittings of the TCF Canada. Add the wait for results, within 15 working days of FEI receiving the session’s papers, and then the next date your centre can offer, and the 20 days turn out to be a floor, not the real wait.
The certificate is valid for 2 years from the date results are issued, and IRCC wants results less than 2 years old both when you complete your Express Entry profile and when you apply for permanent residence. Time spent on a sitting you were not ready for is time you do not get back on that clock.
Speak up before you leave
One route of complaint remains, and it is about how the sitting ran, not about your mark.
Most candidates walk out of a bad sitting wanting only to go home. I would push back on that instinct.
If the room was loud during listening, the audio cut out, or the computer froze mid-essay, say so before you leave the building, and ask the centre how it records it. With re-marking paused, that same-day report may be the only trace of what went wrong.
Preparing for one marking
If there is no second look, preparation carries the whole weight, and I think it should be narrower and harder than most people make it. Not more vocabulary lists. Three things.
First, the clock
- the speaking test
- 12 min
- of preparation, within those 12
- 2 min
- to talk in Tâche 2, once you have prepared
- 3 min 30
Rehearse aloud, at those timings, every time; silent rehearsal trains a skill the exam does not test.
And never learn a text by heart to recite: FEI lists reciting a memorised text as fraud.
Second, finishing
FEI’s own advice for the day is to manage your time so all three writing tasks are done. Practise them in one 60-minute block, and by hand if your centre sits writing on paper.
Third, your own repeated mistakes
A wrong agreement made once is a slip. Made in every essay, it is the point between two bands. Those are the errors to hunt before the exam, because after it, for now, nobody will look again.
This is where Salut Canada fits, and only here:
- Its examiner runs the three speaking tasks at the exam’s timings, then marks your speaking on the exam’s own table of levels and lists your errors with their corrections.
- You can write practice answers by hand and upload photos of the pages to be read and marked.
- Your writing errors become exercises built from your own mistakes.
- Your study plan reads it all against the level you are aiming for.
Sources
- France Éducation international, TCF Canada page (the suspension, its reason and planned resumption, the tests, results, validity, retakes).
- France Éducation international, Évaluation des épreuves du TCF (double blind marking, third marking, FIDELIA).
- France Éducation international, Mes droits et devoirs de candidat au TCF (same-day reporting, fraud).
- France Éducation international, Manuel du candidat TCF, September 2026 (the NCLC table; complaints and appeals).
- IRCC, Express Entry: language test results (validity at profile and application).
Checked on 25 October 2026.