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Simone Braverman

Simone Braverman is the founder of IELTS-Blog.com and the author of several renowned IELTS preparation books, including Ace the IELTS, Target Band 7, the High Scorer's Choice practice test series, and IELTS Success Formula. Since 2005, Simone has been committed to making IELTS preparation accessible and effective through her books and online resources. Her work has helped 100,000's of students worldwide achieve their target scores and live their dream lives. When Simone isn't working on her next IELTS book, video lesson, or coaching, she enjoys playing the guitar or rollerblading.

IELTS exams – the latest news

IELTS is becoming an increasingly popular English language test. It has been around for more than 30 years and last year more than three million people gained IELTS certificates for further education, employment or immigration purposes. The official IELTS website even says that because of the very large numbers of candidates in China, India, Australia, UK and Pakistan, IELTS has become the most popular international English language test in the world!

Slowly but surely IELTS finds its way into the USA – just recently another 57 universities joined the list of many others already recognizing IELTS in the United States. This year more IELTS Test Centers will open in the USA to meet the growing demand for IELTS exams.

The UK has accepted IELTS as the official English test for immigration purposes and IELTS band score can be translated into an equivalent Cambridge ESOL Certificate of a corresponding level.

China has opened its borders to IELTS, and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) was the first school in People’s Republic of China to recognize IELTS – but many more institutions then followed its lead and now IELTS is extremely popular in China.

You can browse the latest IELTS questions from all over the world here

The IELTS Writing – half-band scores

About a year ago there was a change in the IELTS grading system, when half-band scores were introduced for the Writing and Speaking modules. At first there was so much confusion, until they came up with an explanation of those half-bands, but even now many people write to me asking to explain what can make a difference between a full band and a half-band.

According to the IELTS examiners, it is the quality of your writing that makes that half band of difference. Let me explain. I have written a post explaining how your Writing task gets graded, what things are important and what you can get marks for. So let’s take for example one of categories there, “Selecting what information to present”. If the examiner sees that you attempted to do that, but didn’t do it quite right (for example threw too much information away) – that could mean that you get half of band for attempting but not the full band because you didn’t do a very good job selecting information. Usually messing up in just one category is not enough to cost you half-band; it would take two or three mess-ups of that kind to get the half-band taken away.

Another example – weak grammar and poor choice of words can make the difference between band 5.5 and 6. The work can be written in beautiful English but if it doesn’t follow the IELTS format, you’ll never get beyond Band 7.

So I think the bottom line is – they introduced the half bands to make difference between students that know what IELTS writing rules are, try hard but do a poor job following the rules and students that do a good job in fulfilling all the requirements.