ABOUT
Built for the people who mark the papers
Practice Test Builder is made by Sidhu Solutions & Creative Deep, a small software studio in Bathinda, Punjab. We build tools for education businesses, and this one came out of a problem we kept being asked to solve.
Why it exists
Every coaching institute we worked with had the same routine. Photocopied listening papers, a speaker in the corner of the room, a stopwatch on someone’s phone, and two evenings of marking afterwards. The good ones had a question bank built up over years. Almost none of it was online, and the platforms that were online charged per student, held the question bank on someone else’s server, and looked nothing like the test the students were actually going to sit.
So the brief was narrow and stubborn. Put the whole thing on the institute’s own WordPress site. Make the player feel like a computer-delivered test, not a quiz plugin. Mark what a machine can mark, and hand a teacher only the parts that genuinely need a teacher. Then let the institute charge for it however it wants, without asking anyone’s permission or paying anyone a share.
How we build it
PRINCIPLE 01
Your data stays yours
Students, attempts, recordings and question banks live in your database on your hosting. Nothing is sent to a service of ours, and there is no account with us for your students to create.
PRINCIPLE 02
The free version has to be genuinely useful
Not a countdown to a paywall. A tutor with no budget should be able to run real listening tests with it indefinitely, and many do.
PRINCIPLE 03
Realism over features
A highlighter, a question palette and an honest countdown do more for a student’s exam nerves than another chart on a dashboard. We add the exam-room details first.
PRINCIPLE 04
No lock-in, by design
Released under GPL-2.0-or-later. Export your papers whenever you like. If you stop paying, nothing switches off — you simply stop getting updates.
PRINCIPLE 05
Say what the plugin does, not what it might
Everything described on this site is in the code today. Where a number is configurable rather than official — the CELPIP level thresholds, for instance — we say so instead of implying an authority we do not have.
WHO BEHIND THIS
About Developers
We are a small team: developers who have spent years inside WordPress, and teachers who tell us when the exam behaviour is wrong. Being small is the reason support answers come from someone who has actually read the code.
We work with education businesses across India, Canada, the Gulf and the UK — mostly IELTS and CELPIP coaching, occasionally universities placing students by level.
Where we are
Bathinda, Punjab, India — working with customers across time zones, with support hours weighted to IST and North American mornings.
How we are funded
Entirely by licence sales and test bundles. No investors, no advertising, and nothing in the plugin that reports back to us.
Open source position
The free plugin is GPL-2.0-or-later. Third-party components are listed in the license file shipped with the plugin.
LEGAL
Trademarks and independence
IELTS is a registered trademark of the British Council, IDP: IELTS Australia and Cambridge Assessment English. CELPIP is a registered trademark of Paragon Testing Enterprises.
Practice Test Builder is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, certified by or otherwise connected to any of those organisations. Those names appear on this site and inside the plugin only to describe what the practice material is for.
Band and level conversions produced by the plugin are estimates for practice purposes. They are not official scores, they carry no weight with any testing body, and the CELPIP percentage-to-level thresholds in particular are administrator-configurable values rather than published official ones. Set them to match your own institution’s marking policy.
Practice Test Builder for IELTS and Practice Test Builder for IELTS Pro are released under the GNU General Public Licence, version 2 or later.