A short time ago I posted a quiz on the format of the IELTS exam. One question which caused a lot of problems was to do with the format of the reading exam. Many people apparently believed that you were given extra time to fill in the answer sheet at the end of the exam. You are not. Indeed a large part of the difficulty of the IELTS reading paper is down to time management. For most candidates 60 minutes is barely sufficient and many fail to finish in time – every minute counts.
The problem – how long to spend on each question
One exam tip you sometimes read is that you should never spend more than 1 minute on any one question. In principle, this sounds like good advice. It is certainly true that you shouldn’t get stuck and that at some point if you haven’t found the answer you guess intelligently and move on. However, I am personally not convinced that 1 minute a question is good advice and is in fact bad practice.
A common mistake – trying to go too quickly
Very often where you are going to lose most time in the reading is if you become confused. Either you don’t know which piece of the text to look at or which potential answer is correct. My experience shows me that this confusion is often the result of trying to move too quickly and that it is sometimes much more efficient to give more time to some questions than others.
A suggestion – leave more time for some questions
Why? One reason is that the first set of questions you look at are likely to be the hardest set of questions because you are unfamiliar with the text. In contrast, by the time you reach the final set of questions, you are more likely to find the answer quickly just because you are now familiar with the topic and language of the text and its structure. So a suggestion is to give more time to the first set of questions than the last set of questions.
A second factor to consider is that there are different question types. Some questions ask you to look at the whole text (the paragraph/heading matching questions) and some ask you to look at only part of the text. It is likely that the whole text questions are going to take you a little longer. So again it may be sensible to consider leaving more time to certain question types.
Equally, in matching tasks the first question in each group of questions is almost certainly going to take longer than the last question. For the first question you have 8 options to consider and for the last only 4. Once again, it can make sense to give more time to some questions than others.
The best advice?
For me there is no one answer here and it would be a mistake to say it must be done this way or that way as each learner is different. My advice is to experiment and see what works best for you and when you get to the exam room have a strategy which ensures you finish the paper in time.
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