Occasional short pauses and minor disfluencies are normal and don't meaningfully hurt your score — real speech, even from fluent speakers, includes hesitations. What actually affects your Speaking score is long, unfilled pauses and stuttering frequent enough to break the listener's ability to follow your response, since both directly affect the fluency and coherence criteria used to grade Take an Interview.
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A brief pause while transitioning between ideas, or a short "um" while organizing your next thought, is normal and expected — this is how natural spoken English actually sounds. What costs points is a long silent gap, particularly at the start of your response or in the middle of a sentence, where the pause is long enough that a listener would lose track of where your answer was going. The difference is duration and frequency, not the mere presence of a pause.
Occasional stumbles — restarting a word, a brief stammer — don't automatically tank your score, especially if the rest of the response is clear and well-organized. The scoring criteria weigh overall fluency and intelligibility, not a strict penalty per disfluency. Stuttering becomes a real issue when it's frequent enough, or severe enough, to genuinely interrupt the listener's ability to follow your meaning — at that point it's affecting comprehension, which is what's actually being scored.
Keep going rather than restarting the sentence from the beginning. A restart usually costs more time and creates a longer, more noticeable break than simply continuing past a small stumble — and with only 45 seconds per Take an Interview response, that lost time is rarely worth it. If you catch yourself using the wrong word, a quick correction ("I mean...") and moving on reads as normal self-correction, not as a serious error.
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