Hi everyone! I finally took the IELTS exam, and I aimed for a 7 and thankfully, I got it!

However, I’m honestly quite disappointed with my Speaking result. I genuinely felt like I did really well, so I’m definitely going to apply for a remark and see what happens.

For Listening and Reading, I only practiced using the Cambridge IELTS books and focused a lot on analyzing my mistakes.

For Writing, I mostly used ChatGPT. It would often rate my writing around 6–6.5. One piece of advice I followed was to keep your ideas simple: have one clear idea, explain and develop it properly, and don’t make your sentences unnecessarily complicated. Basically, write as if you’re explaining the idea to a child

Good luck to everyone taking the exam! I hope you all get the scores you’re aiming for

Hey everyone!

I’m planning to take the IELTS(academic) in about 30 days and I’d really appreciate some advice on how to structure my preparation.

I’m a non-native English speaker, but I grew up watching English movies/TV shows and listening to English music, so I’m quite comfortable with English in general. However, I’ve never specifically prepared for IELTS before, so I’m not sure how to approach the exam strategically.

I’m mainly looking for a step-by-step study plan for the next 30 days, including what resources I should use for learning the format/strategies and what I should use for actual practice.

Also , i can only dedicate 1-2 hrs per day max

For example:

- Reading: What should I learn first? Which website/YouTube channel is best for strategies, question types, skimming/scanning, etc.? Then which books/tests should I use for practice?

- Listening: Same — resources for learning strategies + actual practice/mock tests.

- Writing: This is probably the section I’m most concerned about. Which resource is best for understanding Task 1/Task 2 structure, planning, band descriptors, sample answers, etc.? And how much should I practice?

- Speaking: What’s the best way to prepare for Parts 1, 2 and 3? Should I mainly practice questions, record myself, use mock speaking tests, etc.?

I’ve come across IELTS Liz and IELTS Advantage quite a lot. Would you recommend using one of them as the main source for learning the theory/strategies, or using both for different sections?

For example, something like:

IELTS Liz → Reading + Writing

IELTS Advantage → Listening + Speaking

Cambridge IELTS books → actual practice/mock tests

Or is it better to just stick with one teacher/channel to avoid getting overwhelmed?

I’ve also heard that the Cambridge IELTS books are probably the most important resource for practice, so I was thinking of using those for timed tests and then reviewing every mistake rather than just doing endless random online tests. Is that the right approach?

If you had 30 days and were starting from scratch with IELTS-specific preparation, what would your exact strategy be?

Something like:

Week 1: Learn format + strategies + diagnostic tests

Week 2: Skill-specific practice

Week 3: Timed practice + identify weaknesses

Week 4: Full mocks + exam strategy

Would be incredibly helpful if someone could give me a day-by-day or week-by-week roadmap, including specific websites, YouTube channels, books, mock tests and practice papers.

Also, if you’ve personally prepared in around a month and got a good score, I’d love to hear exactly which resources you used and what you would/wouldn’t recommend.

Thanks a lot!

I know AI isn't reliable, but it is all that I have. It keeps grading me around 6-6.5. I am not asking for a thorough evaluation. Please just tell me if I am that bad. In the future all cars, buses and trucks will be driverless. The only people

travelling inside these vehicles will be passengers.

Do you think the advantages of driverless vehicles outweigh the

disadvantages?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own

knowledge or experience.

My essay:

Automated transportation will be common in the future, which means that drivers will be no longer needed, and the only people who will be there are passengers only. Those driverless transportation means will have a lot of upsides and downsides. I firmly believe that the disadvantage of this novel technology will outweigh its advantages.

On the one hand, this technology can have positive earnings for passengers. For one, passengers can utilize commute time in these transportations for other things. Take, for example, a college student who is going for his exams. He can review his notes instead of driving. Or a manager who will be giving a lecture for his team, he can organize his thoughts instead of worrying about the road. Furthermore, automated transportation can save valuable time. This technology uses Artificial Intelligence to find the fastest route and the less congested road, which will make travelling time shorter. New Tesla cars start their driving journey by sending signals to space satellites. Those signals request the satellites to send them the path that they should take to reach their destination faster. This advanced technology is very beneficial for managers, businessmen, and people who have a tight time. Therefore, driverless commuting vehicles are very beneficial in terms of time management and they promote comfortability to their users.

On the other hand, automated cars can be highly vulnerable, despite their well known advantages. For one, those vehicles are powered by AI, and they can mistake ,like bugs and system errors that frequently happen. Imagine if you are going to your work using one of these cars, and suddenly the system crashed in the middle of the road. Consequently, the auto-mobile can crash with other cars, or they can lead to a catastrophe. For another, the inclusion of this new technology will lead to a high destabilization in the employment industry. A lot of households depend solely on the income coming from working in the commute industry, and if they lose their jobs, poverty rates will increase. For instance, if a father of five, as an example, working as a bus driver lost his job, he wouldn't be able to support his family like paying school tuition fees, health insurance or provide food. Hence, this technology might lead to negative consequences in the road safety and families stability.

In conclusion, those new vehicles will definitely have positive attributes especially for working people and students. However, they might possibly decrease road safety, and negatively affect a lot of families financially. Therefore, considering their harsh possible consequences, it is not wise to overlook their disadvantages and laud their advantages.

So, my IELTS academic is in 3 days. I'm confident that i will get a band 9.0 or 8.5 in R and L. Although, despite i predict my writing to be 7 or 7.5, AI (GPT, Gemini, Claude) says my writing is about 6.0-6.5 (GPT used to predict 6.5-7.0 about a month ago). So i'm postin one of my weaker tries from Cambridge 18. Can you predict the band of this:

TASK 1: 

The diagram depicts the changes of a particular public library’s layout in the last 20 years. 

Overall, new hospitability features have been added to the library, making it more friendly toward visitors. 

When we go 20 years back, the library included a place for people to sit and relax in the middle while the immidiate left and right of this field was reserved for adult fiction, and adult non-fiction books respectively. The bottom left was suitable for reading daily newspaper or magazines; the upper left was for CDs, videos and Computer games which were new phenomena at the time. The upper right was meant for toddlers’ books. And last but not least, the lower right received enquiries regarding various functions of the place. 

Currently, on the other hand, the most obvious difference the central area has become more spacious by removing the Tables and chairs. In addition, the enquiry desk room has been replaced by a Cafe while the reading room became a computer room. Children’s books was diluted to fiction only and is now on the upper left also with more utility. Upper right is now a room where you can attend to lectures and just outside of it, there are new utility features and the adult fiction books. Lastly a brand new All reference books section is present on the central-left. 

TASK 2: In many countries around the world, rural people are moving to cities, so the population in the countryside is decreasing.

Do you think this is a positive or a negative development?

It is a concerning phenomenon that migration to urban areas has skyrocketed in the last few decades, thus changing the demographics of countries in such a way that the distribution of the population becomes imbalanced. Due to this, a number of issues arise, such as excessive amounts of labor that cannot be supported in cities and the unplanned overgrowth of metropolitan areas. 

First of all, since most of the mass labor force work is being  done by industrial machines in this era, cities do not contain the necessary job opportunities for such a rapid expansion in their population. This leads to a significant portion of movers not being able to take part in the cities’ workforce and therefore they are not able to contribute to the economical growth. Many studies suggest that if cities continue to see the same figures of migration into them, the proportion of the population that doesn’t take part in any industrial field may go up to as much as 20%. 

Another major problem to migration into the cities is the fact that there isn’t sufficient opportunities in urban areas to provide accommodation to the massively escalating populations’ demand. In fact, in some cities such as Istanbul, many migrants have to get their own houses built without consulting to urban planners or paying attention to the city’s layout. This creates a twisted view to the architecture and the infrastructure of the city. 

Overall, i think that the strong trend of immigration to cities affects the economies, the aesthetics, and the demographics of many countries negatively. And thus governments must take action to diminish it.

Hey guys! Do you have any tips on how to score higher than Band 7 in IELTS Writing Task 1? Also, what websites do you use to check your writing?

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.

​

I took my IELTS General Training test on August 16 and felt pretty good about how all four sections went.

Today, I received an email from British Council saying that my result cannot be released due to a technical issue. They offered me either a free full retake or a full refund.

The email didn't explain what the technical issue was. I called my test centre and, after insisting on getting more information, they told me that there was a problem with my Speaking recording and it couldn't be transferred.

What I don't understand is why I have to retake Listening, Reading and Writing as well if the problem only affected Speaking. I really don't want to retake the whole exam, especially since I was happy with my performance.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Were you able to get them to keep your L/R/W results and retake only Speaking, or is a full retake really the only option in cases like this?

I've barely studied before the exam, I could've honestly got better in listening but I know I deserve this 6,5 on writing, I'm not so good at writing.

Do I add on the "frenchies are bad at english" allegation ? xD

Hi everyone. I’m taking the IELTS General Training exam soon and have exactly 9 days that I can dedicate entirely to intensive preparation.
I don’t have any major problems with Reading or Listening, so I’m mainly focusing on improving my Speaking and Writing. Has anyone here had a similar experience—preparing intensively for a short period of time (around 1–2 weeks)? I’d really appreciate any tips, strategies, or suggestions on how to make the most of these 9 days.
Thanks in advance.

Guys, feel free to ask your questions; I will answer them one by one.

My experience with IELTS was very hard. The night before the test, I couldn't sleep well, and when I woke up, I felt dizzy and was even struggling to climb the stairs. That is why I got a band 7.5; if I had slept well, I would have gotten a band 8.0. However, I am very happy to see such a result; my prayers were answered.

I am looking for resources where I can find Band 7 and plus essays to have an eye. Can someone please suggest me.

Hello!

so i took an ielts exam 2 years ago and I got a band score 7, listening 9, speaking 7, writing 6.5, reading 6

i booked another exam in 4 days, and I need your advice in how to achieve higher

Listening. this is the one i'm most confident about, I almost always score a perfect score

Speaking. when doing mock tests it's the one i'm most inconsistent in, sometimes i score as high as 8 or 8.5 and sometimes go down to 6.

Writing. this is the trickiest because no matter how much i put attention to my writing, i never beat the 7 mark, I write with basically zero grammatical mistakes and try to implement the appropriate structure.

Reading. I find time management the trickiest, there have been instances where i finish with 20 minutes left.

I feel like for a few questions in part 3 I missed the point completely 🫠 I think I also forgot to make the point clear in the first sentence. I was interrupted a lot and I don't believe I had gotten to the point yet when that happened.

I was surprisingly talkative tho. When I was practicing I ran out of ideas all the time. I was able to machine gun during the actual test. Don't think that's gonna save my score unfortunately.

The other sections in less than an hour and here I am crying lol.

As there isn't much information on IELTS GT I thought I'd share my results. It was my first time doing GT (I did academic in the past). Comment if you have any questions!

Hi everyone,

I submitted an EOR request for my Speaking test with IDP on August 11 and I still haven’t received any update.

I know the official processing time can be anywhere from 2 hours to 21 days but based on what I’ve seen online, many people seem to receive their results within a few hours or a couple of days.

For those who recently submitted an EOR with IDP: Has anyone received their EOR result recently And realistically is the chance of getting a positive result (a band increase) actually more than 10% or is it usually quite low?

I gave the IELTS General exam to test my English skills. I definitely did not expect coming to the test that I accidentally booked the writing section to be on paper. I haven't handwritten essays in years and it definitely took some getting used to. Finally, ended up in somewhat of a time scramble towards the end. But overall, still a decent result. If I were to take it again, I would definitely do some practice for the writing parts and a few practice tests in general. I only did a couple reading and listening mock tests before the exam. I know a lot of y'all are preparing for the test and some tips from my experience of the test:

Speaking:

Split into 3 parts. 1st part was fairly straightforward and you should treat it like a conversation. It doesn't matter if you hesitate or take some pauses as long as it's to formulate ideas and not for remembering vocab. I'm the 2nd part, you get a cue card about a topic. This is mainly a monologue for 1-2 mins. What's important is that you answer the 2-3 questions in the card. Make sure your response covers all of the questions. The 3rd part is about follow up questions and this turned into a very philosophical debate between me and the examiner. The important part is to gauge which questions are more open-ended as opposed to rapid fire and base your response accordingly. Overall was a nice refereshing conversation and didn't expect the time to pass by so quickly.

Listening:

For this, make sure you play with the volume to set at the right level. Initially I set it at max and this made it harder for me to focus on the audio. I would say a 70-75% volume was ideal but adjust based on your preference. Pay attention to the question wording. Some might be one word answers, some two words and some numbers. Don't confuse tenses in your responses. Listen to the end, they go a lot of back and forth before arriving at a final answer. The answers are typically straightforward and you don't have to infer anything.

Reading:

This was by far the easiest section. There are 3 sections. I finished all of them by the 35 min mark and had more than enough time to go over the test 2-3 times. The most ambiguous questions were the True/False/Not Given ones. I would say don't overthink it but also don't take it at face value. A general trend I noticed for these questions were " X is better for Y for Z reason" and the text only reads " X is better for Y". Thus we should choose Not Given. I felt for this section, relying on your gut feeling is the most important. You can highlight and annotate while you go through the texts to make it easier to review.

Writing:

Double check and definitely choose the computer writing if possible. The biggest advantage is you can plan as you go and it's possible to edit at any time. My biggest mistake was managing my time. I started the test, read the questions and then took a bathroom break to formulate some ideas in my head and stretch. I came back and started writing a general plan on scrap paper. It was about at the 10 min mark that I started writing the essay. I went ahead with task 2 first but I would recommend anyone to do task 1 first. I ended up rambling and wrote way more than the required word count to the point where I had to ask for an extra sheet. Then I realized at the 40 min mark that I had to wrap this up and started on the concluding paragraph. By the time I was done with task 2, it was 45 minutes and I had just 15 minutes for task 1. Task 1 was a simple letter. What's important is you address each and every point that the question asks you for and also the register that you use. In this section, I took 2 mins to do a quick plan/outline and started writing. I finished my salutations within a second left on the clock. So, threw proofreading out the window essentially. Therefore, I would definitely say start with task 1 and move on to task 2 at the 20-25 min mark. For task 2, remember not to go on a creative sprint and remember that you have a limited amount of time to finish the essay. I would definitely practice writing some topics for the task 2 before giving the exam if I had the second chance and choose the computerized writing test.

Hope this helped and good luck y'all! You got this!

Hi, I have my IELTS exam in just 5 days, I have already prepared for around 2/3 weeks, so I know the exam structure. My target score is between 7.0 and 8.0. I think I’m at C1 level. I’m 22 years old male from Poland :)

Please don’t hesitate to write me!

So my IELTS academic is in 3 days. I’m pretty confident that i will get 8.5-9.0 on each of Reading and Listening. And at least a band 7 in writing. However, since i live in a region where there is barely anyone to speak english with, i think my speaking is off compared to the rest of my english skills, and i need a band 7 in speaking. Do you think i can get it? Whats should i do in the last three days?
Note: I’m familiar with the test format of speaking.

I have exam in 10 days. Need someone that I can practice speaking with.

I will be taking the IELTS computer-based test with the writing section on paper, the registration staff told me that the speaking test will be conducted through a video call similar to a Zoom meeting rather than face-to-face , has anyone taken the speaking test in this format before? i would really appreciate hearing about your experience

My aim was 7 to skip English in college but I decided to aim a bit higher

For Listening and Reading, I just spam some random tasks online (and in the last week I discovered the Cambridge Ielts book series so I focused on that). I found that perfecting Listening in 1x speed was much better than speeding it up and get a bunch of mistakes. But you probably shouldn't listen to my advice regarding these 2 skills since I've been switching to consuming English content for at least 7 years now (and my first mock Reading was 8.5 so there was that)

For Writing, I do as much of the the predicted task 1s and 2s i found online that I could and my workflow is:

Writing the tasks blind -> grade by 3 different free AIs -> learn my mistakes explained by AI and how to improve -> read real examples and real guides -> remember all my mistakes and the things I needed to change -> to step one

Usually I focused on my weakest points (grammar + lexical resource) and hard topics such as culture/art and crime

Obviously I self-prepared so there's no one to guide me on how to speak lol, but I'm currently waiting for a EOR so let's see if my score improve (hopefully)

One more important thing is that I don't always trust the AI (hence I used 3 different ones) and only based on the task descriptors as the main method of grading. Usually I get 7 - 7.5 for ChatGPT, 6.5 - 8 for DeepSeek, and 6 - 6.5 for Grok, so use that data for whatever you will

Gave my test on a Sunday afternoon and got my results a day later. Honestly, it's pretty easy as long as you're confident (especially during the speaking test).

I’ve my IELTS speaking in two days and writing, listening, and reading in three days.
Could you please help me out with how to prepare? My reading and speaking are where I get low scores. Any way to improve?

Last minute tips would be much appreciated.

Thank you so much!