My Twitter profile says “hate IELTS”. In fact, I don’t. Or not completely. I believe that IELTS is a good test. One reason I do hate it though is that many candidates don’t understand it. What is worse is that because they don’t understand it, they stop learning English. What is even worse is that because they stop learning English, they don’t get their target score in the test. That makes me mad.
In this post and the next, I am go to explain about IELTS and how to study for it. The idea being that if you study in the right way, you will in the end get your target score. Feel free to disagree with anything I say. All this is personal opinion. My real goal is to get you to think about how to study. That cannot be a bad thing.
IELTS is a good test of English
Yes, I do really believe this. The idea of IELTS is to test your level of English and put it into a band. These bands are very wide: there are only 9 of them. In fact, there are really only 7 bands, as band 9 is for native speakers and band 0 is for complete non-speakers.
This means that everyone who takes the test falls into one of 7 bands or half bands. The examiners do not get it wrong (or only very rarely): it is quite easy to tell the difference between one band and the next.
It’s impossible to fail IELTS
Yes, that’s right. It’s not a pass/fail exam. All the test does is tell you your level of English: you cannot fail.
It is of course quite possible that you want a higher score, but that is not the fault of the exam, it’s to do with your level of general English. Perhaps, you are a doctor and you need band 7 to go to work in Australia or the UK. You get band 6. You haven’t failed, your English is simply not good enough. Please don’t be offended I am married to a doctor who had to do IELTS to work in the UK – I do understand.
This matters because many people prepare for IELTS as if it was a pass/fail exam. If I study the exam for 3 months, surely I should pass. Actually, it doesn’t quite work that way: language tends to take many months to learn – years in some cases. Sorry. A real problem is that many candidates stop learning English and start learning the exam. That is extremely dangerous.
Is IELTS perfect?
Of course not. All tests have their own problems. Here are some of the problems I see with IELTS:
Academic reading: unless you are band 6 or above, the test is simply too hard to use normal reading skills. The only way for lower level candidates to get a score is to learn special exam reading techniques. I am not sure that’s right.
Listening: if you misspell a word, you get no mark. I understand why this is the case, but for me it punishes poor spellers too much.
Writing: academic task 1 is a bit too unusual. Many candidates will never do that sort of writing either before the test or again after it. To do it well, you need to learn special IELTS skills. I don’t like that.
Speaking: it’s better than TOEFL as you get to speak to a person not a computer. The problem is that that person reads a script and doesn’t respond to what you say. It’s a monologue, not a dialogue. This is again unusual and sometimes needs special training. (Sorry for the quality of the video – it was one of my first.)
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