ABRSM piano sight-reading
Sight-read every
grade
Nine grades, one test, no surprises except the notes. This is every ABRSM piano sight-reading parameter from Initial Grade to Grade 8, transcribed from the printed 2025 & 2026 syllabus, with a rung per grade that says what is new, what to drill, and what to stop worrying about.
Checked against the ABRSM 2025-26 syllabus · valid through 2028 · last reviewed 3 September 2026
The nine grades
InitialOne hand, five fingers, no panic - Keys
- 2 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4
- Hands
- Hands separately, each in a five-finger position from the key note up to the fifth
New at this grade: C major · D minor · 4/4 · 2/4
Initial Grade
1Three new keys and a rest to count - Keys
- 5 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4 3/4
- Hands
- any five-finger position
New at this grade: G major · F major · A minor · 3/4
Grade 1
2The hands meet - Keys
- 8 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4 3/4
- Hands
- hands together
New at this grade: D major · E minor · G minor · hands together
Grade 2
3Leaving the five-finger nest - Keys
- 12 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4 3/4 3/8
- Hands
- the hand moves out of the five-finger position
New at this grade: A major · B♭ major · E♭ major · B minor
Grade 3
46/8 arrives, no new keys - Keys
- 12 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4 3/4 3/8 6/8
- Hands
- the hand moves out of the five-finger position
New at this grade: 6/8 · an upbeat (anacrusis) start · chromatic notes outside the key · pauses (fermatas)
Grade 4
5Four sharps, four flats, four-part chords - Keys
- 16 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4 3/4 3/8 6/8
- Hands
- the hand moves out of the five-finger position
New at this grade: E major · A♭ major · F♯ minor · C minor
Grade 5
6Pedal, triplets and odd time - Keys
- 18 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4 3/4 3/8 6/8 9/8 5/8 5/4
- Hands
- the hand moves out of the five-finger position
New at this grade: C♯ minor · F minor · 9/8 · 5/8
Grade 6
77/8, 8va and the soft pedal - Keys
- 18 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4 3/4 3/8 6/8 9/8 5/8 5/4 7/8 7/4
- Hands
- the hand moves out of the five-finger position
New at this grade: 7/8 · 7/4 · changes of tempo · octave (8va) signs
Grade 7
8A whole page, and it wants character - Keys
- 20 in play
- Time
- 4/4 2/4 3/4 3/8 6/8 9/8 5/8 5/4 7/8 7/4 12/8
- Hands
- the hand moves out of the five-finger position
New at this grade: B major · D♭ major · 12/8 · three-note chords, either hand
Grade 8
Key signatures at Initial Grade
Sharps on the left, flats on the right: the widest signature each way that this grade can put in front of you.
The test
Half a minute, then play
The whole test, from page 15 of the specification. The examiner hands you a short unaccompanied piece you have never seen. You get half a minute to look through it and, if you want, try out any or all of it on the piano. Then you play it for assessment. That is it.
Also on that page. Any fingering printed on the test is "for guidance only"; use whatever produces "a successful musical outcome", ABRSM's words. Sample tests are published by ABRSM and buying them "is not a requirement". Blind or partially sighted candidates can choose a Braille memory or aural repetition test instead, if requested when booking.
What it is worth: 21 marks out of 150, which is 14 per cent, the same as scales and arpeggios and more than aural (page 57). Each piece is 30. Sight-reading is worth 70 per cent of a piece and is the component we see prepared least, which is odd, since its contents are published in advance.
How it is marked: the same criteria at every grade, Initial to 8, on page 60, and they are printed on the card beside this. Examiners mark up or down from the pass mark, weighing pitch, time, tone, shape and performance (page 58).
Read the first line of each band. Fluent. Adequate tempo. Continuity. Lacking continuity. No continuity. The whole ladder is about whether the music kept going. Wrong notes are tolerated in every band below Distinction, including Pass ("despite errors"). A stopped pulse is what moves you down.
ABRSM's own advice, from its previous website (archived 2023; the current site no longer carries the page): "look slightly ahead, keep going at a manageable speed, ignore any slips and keep your nerve", and "examiners rarely hear perfect attempts at these tests but will always appreciate evidence of the right approach". And, from page 57: "A Pass in each component of the exam is not required to pass overall." You can have a bad half minute and still walk out with a Distinction.
What the specification does not say: whether the examiner counts you in, whether you may restart, what tempo is expected, whether you may count out loud. None of it is printed. Anyone who tells you otherwise is reporting their room, not the rule.
From the syllabus
Marking, every grade
| Band | Marks | Examiners hear |
|---|---|---|
| Distinction | 19-21 | Fluent and rhythmically accurate. Notes, pitch and key correct. Musical detail brought out. Confident delivery. |
| Merit | 17-18 | A workable tempo and a mostly steady pulse. Rhythm mostly right. Notes, pitch and key largely right. A largely secure delivery. |
| Pass | 14-16 | Keeps going, on the whole. Note values mostly observed. The shape of the pitch is there, despite errors. A cautious delivery. |
| Below Pass | 11-13 | Continuity breaks down. Note values wrong. Notes, pitch and key only approximate. An insecure delivery. |
| 7-10 | No continuity, or incomplete. Note values not observed. No pitch shape. A very uncertain delivery. | |
| No work offered | 0 |
21 of 150 marks (14%), p. 57; bands and marks as printed on p. 60, descriptors in our words. ABRSM Piano Syllabus 2025 & 2026.
The dial
Turn the grade, watch the exam grow
Every grade page carries its own copy of this card. Here they are together.
Checked by us against the 2025-26 syllabus
| Length |
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|---|---|
| Time signatures |
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| Keys |
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| Hands |
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| Other features |
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Deal me a note
What a test can ask of your eyes
Pick a grade. The staff deals notes inside its keys, key signature shown. Press the letter, or click it.
This checks the letter. MidiSlayer checks the note you actually played, in time.
How to drill
Little and often, with honest feedback
Sight-reading is the most preparable part of the exam and, in our experience, the least prepared. The keys, time signatures, note values and hand positions that can appear at each grade are printed on one page. Nothing in the test is a surprise except the specific notes. So preparation is not "get better at reading". It is closing the specific gaps your grade can test, then doing it often enough that your eyes stop needing to think.
The dose matters more than the material. Ten minutes most days beats two hours on Sunday, because pattern recognition is filed mostly during sleep, not during the session. Missing a day is fine. Missing a week is a restart. The long version of that argument is in How to practise sight-reading without burning out.
Four rules survive every grade:
- Always slightly too easy. Read material about two grades below your pieces. If you are stopping to work things out, it is too hard to teach your eyes anything.
- Never repeat. The second time through, you are memorising. Fresh material every time, so a big pile of easy pieces beats a thin book of hard ones.
- Keep the pulse, sacrifice the notes. Wrong note, keep going. Stopped pulse, that is the actual mistake, and page 60 agrees with you.
- Use the half minute for something. Key, time, first note of each hand, the one bar that looks odd. Not bar one played four times.
Then the grade-specific layer, which is what the nine rungs are for. Grade 2 is mostly about hands together. Grade 4 needs 6/8 and adds no keys at all. Grade 5 needs geography in E and A♭. Grade 8 needs B and D♭ major and three-note chords. The band-by-band drill map is in ABRSM sight-reading: what to drill; each rung below turns its band into a week.
Nobody reads well because they practised hardest. They read well because showing up stayed cheap.
The honest bit
What MidiSlayer does here, and what it does not
MidiSlayer's Graded Reading deals single notes, one at a time, in the keys and ranges of the ABRSM grade you pick, key signature on the staff, keys grouped by the grade the 2025-26 table introduces them at. Notes you miss come back more often within a session. It is a note-and-key drill with a MIDI keyboard listening, and that is all it claims to be: it is not an exam simulator and it will not hand you an eight-bar test. Phrase-level reading, the two-staves-at-once skill, lives in Practice with real pieces. Graded Reading is part of the full app, one payment, yours to keep. The free version includes Note Flashcards, the Learn course and the daily game. Download it free.
Free to start. One payment for everything, yours to keep.
Questions
Asked and answered
21 of 150, or 14 per cent (page 57). That is the same as scales and arpeggios, more than aural (18), and 70 per cent of one piece (30). Pass overall is 100, Merit 120, Distinction 130.
Half a minute (page 15). ABRSM's older web copy said "up to half a minute". In that time you may look, or try out any or all of it.
A wrong note played in time costs little: the Pass band says "pitch outlines in place, despite errors" and Merit is "largely correct notes". Stopping is different. "Lacking overall continuity" is the Below Pass descriptor. Play on, keep the beat, never go back.
The Pass band starts at 14 of 21 (page 60). ABRSM prints the bands, not a pass number, so 14 is derived from the table.
Yes. "A Pass in each component of the exam is not required to pass overall" (page 57). Three good pieces and solid scales carry a weak half minute a long way.
No. "Any fingering shown on the test is for guidance only" (page 15).
The specification does not say. There is no printed count-in, no printed restart rule, and no tempo rule. Prepare to start on your own and to keep going, and you will not be surprised.
No. The 2027 & 2028 specification says the sight-reading requirements "stay the same as the preceding syllabus", and we diffed the two PDFs' sight-reading, marks and criteria pages to be sure. Everything on these pages holds until at least 31 December 2028.
How we checked this
How we checked this
Every parameter on these pages was transcribed from the printed ABRSM Piano Syllabus 2025 & 2026 (the qualification specification): parameters on page 16, the test on page 15, marks on page 57, criteria on page 60. Page numbers are the printed ones; a PDF viewer shows one higher. The note values and rests are music-font glyphs that text extraction loses, so we read them from a 600 dpi render and wrote them out in words. We then diffed the 2027 & 2028 specification against it: the sight-reading, marks and criteria pages are identical apart from running headers and two reworded introductory sentences on pages 57 and 58, as ABRSM's June 2026 announcement also says. Two widely read grade tables online did not survive the same check. One puts the pedal at Grade 5 and calls Grades 7 and 8 "all keys"; the printed table has right pedal at Grade 6 and adds only B and D♭ majors at Grade 8. The other cites the 2023-24 syllabus and gives Grade 7 as 14 to 18 bars; the printed cell is "c. 16-20". Last checked against print: 3 September 2026.
ABRSM Piano Syllabus 2025 & 2026, sight-reading parameters p. 16, about the test p. 15, marks p. 57.
MidiSlayer is independent of ABRSM and not endorsed by it. ABRSM is a trade mark of The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, used here to identify the exams these pages describe. Exam facts are taken from the ABRSM Piano Syllabus 2025 & 2026 (© ABRSM), quoted briefly with acknowledgement and otherwise stated in our own words.