Answers · Fairness & data
How do you handle accents?
Accent is never graded. Two specific engineering decisions exist to keep it that way.
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This is the question we get asked most sharply, usually by someone who has seen a tool get it wrong. Two things are worth knowing.
- Grading happens on a transcript produced after the call from the recorded audio, not on the live stream. Live transcription mishears accented speech more often, and grading on it produced real misgrades. That was changed.
- The interviewer is instructed not to treat a pronunciation or transcription variant of a term as unfamiliarity with the concept. A student who says a technical word differently is not marked down for not knowing it.
Fluency, hesitation, filler words and speaking pace are not scored. What is scored is whether the reasoning arrives.
When the audio itself was hard to transcribe, the report tells you so rather than letting a thin transcript read as a thin answer.
This is one page of the documentation inside Viva.
Instructors get the rest — the walkthroughs, the screenshots, and Ask Viva, which finds the right page from a typed question.