Today I am happy to share with you a few tips received from Vinay Kumar, an IT professional from Bangalore, India. He recently took the Academic version of IELTS, scored band 8.5 and thinks that’s a pretty pathetic result 🙂 – imagine that!
I am sure many of you would absolutely love to get that ‘pathetic’ score, and so here is how you can: for starters, you could avoid the same pitfalls Vinay tells you about.
Here are the seven IELTS mistakes Vinay wishes he didn’t make:
1. He used just one book (provided by the IDP) and one set of practice tests to prepare – instead of getting at least one more book and another source of practice materials.
2. He didn’t check the venue before the exam, and as a result ended up parking a kilometer from the place. That’s quite a bit of walking before the exam!
3. He was late for the test – no need to tell you how stressful that can be.
4. He didn’t actively practice for speaking, only read the transcripts. Instead he could have asked a friend to play the examiner to get some speaking practice.
5. He spoke too fast – which is why, he suspects, the score for that section went down from Band 9 to Band 8.
6. His writing wasn’t as neat and tidy as he’d like due to many re-written sentences.
7. He finished writing ahead of time – instead he should have managed his time better to write a more complete essay.
However, there are also a few things Vinay thinks he did right 🙂 You can read more about his IELTS exam and things he did right here.