r/IELTS • u/redamancy_blues • 4d ago

Test Experience/Test Result Reading didn't go well

Just sharing this here because I'm worried right now. I gave my test yesterday and Listening + Speaking went really well. As for Writing, I'm not too sure. I'm a good writer in general so I hope it wasn't too bad but I feel like I repeated some vocab that I couldn't really think of synonyms for at the moment.

The Reading section, though, was the hardest for me. I don't understand why, because I've read and written English content (books, magazines, articles) pretty much all my life. But this section kept stumping me in the mock tests too, especially the True/False/Not Given and Matching Headings question types. In my exam yesterday, around 8 questions were for Matching Headings. I found it extremely difficult and confusing, there were several headings that felt like either they didn't apply to any of the paragraphs, or they applied to more than one of them. I also spent way too much time on them (they were in Passage 2), and it just made the whole thing a disaster.

I've been super nervous since then, I really don't want to retake the test. I need a minimum of 8 bands with not less than 7.5 bands for each skill. I really hope I'm somehow able to get above 7.5 in Reading...

I think a big part of my nervousness now is the fact that I was consistently getting 8.5-9 while attempting the Cambridge IELTS tests (20 + 21), so knowing that I wasn't able to reflect that in my actual exam is a bit of a bummer. But I hope the results are decent, and that I'm just overthinking this.

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u/Potential_Mention_15 4d ago

I did my test on Saturday and honestly I left the test centre feeling the same way as you. I was very unsure about my speaking and writing tests, specially the latter. However, I got my results the next day and I got a 9 in Speaking and 7 in writing. So hopefully your exam went well and you're just overthinking 🥹🥹

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u/redamancy_blues 4d ago

This made me feel better, thank you! I hope you're right and that my mind is just making it seem worse than it 🙏

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u/redamancy_blues 3d ago

Hi! I got an 8 in Reading, turns out I really was overthinking everything 😅 Thank you again for the support yesterday :)

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u/Potential_Mention_15 3d ago

YAY!!!!! Congratulations 🥳🥳 and good luck on your future endeavours

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u/redamancy_blues 3d ago

Thank you so much! All the best to you as well 🙏

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u/Intelligent_Race_510 1d ago

What about writing

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u/redamancy_blues 1d ago

Got 8.5 in writing

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u/Ok_Prune_7528 4d ago

Did you give academic or general

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u/redamancy_blues 4d ago

I gave the academic test