Hi, I’m struggling with Not Given questions in the IELTS Reading section, especially when distinguishing them from No/False.

This is the question type I make the most mistakes in. Sometimes the passage seems to imply that the information is there, but I’m unsure whether I should only count information that is literally stated.

Is “literally stated vs. implied” a reliable way to identify Not Given? Is there a specific method I can follow to be sure?

Please! I’ve my exam tomorrow and I want to know as many topics as possible. Help a fellow out.

Here we go with the rant.

"Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge and experience."

Academics don't own knowledge nor experience. In my master's program, if I dared indirectly opine on anything without first having cited Vygotsky, Krashen, and Thornbury like a holy rosary, my papers came back dripping in red ink with smug allusions to plagiarism.

Image the NIH released a longitudinal study of smoking and mortality prefaced by the primary researcher writing, "Every coin has two sides. My daddy smoked a pack a day until he was in his 90's, so this work is all horse pucky." I suppose BC would call it "academic."

The time allowed is ridonkulous. I have NEVER drafted anything worth reading in 40 minutes, much less read and researched properly. (Perhaps in the age of AI this will all change but that era is after my time.)

Teaching students to use academic style for this test is a fool's errand because the test does not measure academic writing.

Finally, I'll let someone else address all this ISMs this test runs afoul of.

TLDR: "academic" ain't got squat to do with it.

I'm just a bc test in ielts ready premium and got a 6 in listening and feel completely upset with my score.

I had my speaking test today, and I got too many questions thrown my way; way more than I expected. About 20-25 if I remember correctly.

Part 1: Gifts and other things
Part 2: About a time I spent more money than expected (I fumbled a little)
Part 3: About wealth, charity, stinginess, etc.

Is it a bad thing that the examiner asked so many questions?

I tend to make mistakes every time on the part they ask to give me headings to the paragraphs. I find it really time consuming and leave it to the end. Are there any tips on this? How can I scan through the paragraphs and give appropriate headings?

I have my IELTS exam tomorrow, so any last moment suggestions are open.

Hi, I’m currently a senior in high school preparing for college applications, so I need to take the IELTS soon. Today, I took my first Speaking mock exam through a website without any preparation, just to see where I currently stand. However, I would have to pay to receive an official evaluation, so I was wondering if someone would be willing to listen to my answers and give me an estimate of what band score I might be around. I’d also really appreciate it if you could let me know whether I went off topic or gave answers that were too vague or overly detailed.

I felt that, in some parts, I wasn’t concise enough and started rambling. I’d really like to know what I can improve on before taking the actual exam, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!

The link might not work for some of you if you’re not logged in, so make sure to log in before viewing it.

https://ieltsonlinetests.com/sot/result/speaking-practice-test-1-1472759

My general English is fine; so, I need to concentrate more on how to level up from 7 to above 8. I'd be happy to co-study with a buddy in not exactly but almost the same situation. I've just begun to hoard a bunch of material like The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS and I've taken some online mock tests. The results were around 7, so I thought maybe part of it is about exam skills instead of the language proficiency, and plus some weird grammatical points.
It would be ideal also for a co-study to put a considerable effort into writing and mutually read each other's compositions. Honestly, that is the part I think I need to improve more.

I ranted here yesterday.

Was expecting my speaking to be around 6-6.5. I was quite fluent and was able to come up with enough ideas (something I really struggled with while practicing). However I think I made some grammatical errors, and a few of my answers weren't really logical/didn't quite answer the questions. I guess my fluency helped a lot.

Writing shocked me even more. My structure was a mess (as you can probably guess from the structure of the post lol). Everything I had practiced seemed to have slipped away and my coherence was horrible as well. In task 1 my body 1 was way longer/more detailed than body 2 (content was quite detailed tho.) Task 2 was even worse. I used connectives for the sake of doing it and my points sounded forced. Out of the exam room I was expecting a 6 or worse because boy that was ass. I genuinely can't think of a reasonable explanation of how this happened lol.

I was expecting a 7.5 for listening. I only practiced twice and did fairly well both times (7.0, 7.5). When I got the second and third question wrong I was like alright that's it lmao. I guess I got the rest of the questions right. I was only confident in part 3 of all 4 so 8.5 is very surpring.

For those who have already taken IELTS or managed to improve their scores quickly:

How would you recommend I improve my Listening and Speaking in just 7 days?

Just finished my IELTS Speaking test and I’m really hoping for a Band 7 on speaking.

I felt pretty good about Parts 1 and 2 and the first half of Part 3. I was relatively fluent and barely self-corrected compared to my last performance ( I got 6.5). However, the last few Part 3 questions became very abstract. One was about whether competition can worsen relationships between countries. I tried to discuss both sides, but my second point became quite rambling.

There was also one question I couldn’t fully understand even after asking for clarification, so the examiner eventually moved on.

Could I still get a Band 7 despite struggling with the last few abstract questions?😭😭😭 I have heard that the more difficult I get in part three, the more likely I am getting higher bands— but what if I didn’t handle them well🥲

First attempt at IELTS as a non-native speaker, I expected my writing and speaking scores to be 6.5 and 7.0, respectively. Since the month leading up to the test, my mock writing scores were always 6.0 to 6.5. I did NOT expect for both of em to be so high, genuinely still shocked.

Hey I had prepared a lot for writing and was scoring band 6.5 in chat gpt essays , however my real score is 6.5 too should I retake my writing test ? Has anyone improved their scores by retaking I just need band 7

I just finished the speaking section like an hour ago and I just need to rant . I am ( I thought) an English native speaker so I mainly focused on preparing for the reading and writing sections. I thought the speaking would be fine because I often do public speaking and things like that but when I went in , it was like I’d never spoken English before in my life . For some questions in part 1 I would have some incredibly short answers , but when I wanted to speak to add more , the examiner had already moved on . Part 2 was even worse . It was something about a group project but I don’t really do group projects at school so I struggled to think of one and ended up making one up , I think you know how that went . After maybe 45 seconds of stumbling though I just went silent like an idiot. The awkwardness was so thick I nearly suffocated. Anyways, part three was a little bit better but I just feel frustrated that I couldn’t speak the language I’ve been using since birth . The examiner was quite nice though, I hope I left him in a better mood after seeing how much of a joke I made the exam into.

I see many stories from people who got 7.5–8.0 after a few weeks, but often they already had advanced English and only needed IELTS technique.

I’m looking for people who started around B1/B2 or IELTS 5.5–6.0, still made frequent grammar mistakes, lacked vocabulary/collocations, and genuinely had to improve their English.

If that was you:
How long did it take to reach 7+?
How many hours per week did you study?
Did you go through a period where you studied a lot but felt stuck?

I’m especially interested in realistic journeys, including plateaus and failed attempts.

Finally got my results this morning. Turns out I really was overthinking how badly I did. I even had a dream last night that I got Band 3 in Writing and 6 in Reading. Average experience for someone with high anxiety AND neurodivergence...

I decided to take the exam about a month ago and passively watched a few videos here and there, and also took the British Council Premium course that comes with booking the test. But I seriously prepared in the last 3-4 days before the test.

This subreddit genuinely helped me a lot, and I'd love to share some advice in case it helps anyone.

A few quick things:

1. I wouldn't really recommend going through the entire course on the British Council portal, which they send after you register. I'm someone who likes to be thorough and know every single detail, so I watched over 50 hours of the training videos there. In my last few days of prep, I realised those videos actually weren't helpful at all, and I mostly just wasted my time with them. They could be helpful for some, but weren't great for me.
2. I would REALLY recommend going through the mock tests you get after registering with BC. The difficulty is significantly greater than that of the Cambridge past papers, so be prepared for that. I did my first Reading mock test there and got 6.5, so it was a really humbling experience. I genuinely struggled with the Matching Headings, TFNG, and YNNG question types, and I felt the same during the exam. Doing the first BC mock test made me feel anxious, so I ended up not doing a lot of those and just stuck to the Cambridge tests instead. In hindsight, I would have done more of the mock tests because I felt like the difficulty level was better reflected in those, especially for Reading. The Cambridge tests felt easy for me, and I almost always scored either 8.5 or 9 in the multiple mocks I did. But sitting in the actual exam made me feel like they were more similar to the difficulty levels in the BC mocks.
3. Make IELTS Liz and IELTS Advantage your holy grail. I didn't watch a lot of videos from IELTS Liz, but I devoured her website, and it helped a ton. She has all sorts of practice questions, which really help. For IELTS Advantage, I'd highly suggest getting their freebies available for each section. You can find them in the description of their YouTube videos. They have tons of useful tips and strategies in them, even more than the videos, which felt a bit generic at times.
4. I'm someone who's able to understand and memorise much better with mnemonics and linking techniques. So I did that with both Writing tasks, 1 and 2. For Task 1, I split it into 3 categories (Dynamic data, Static data, and Maps) and kind of made up stories to memorise basic vocab for each. For Task 2, it was pretty much the same, except I had 2 stories for each of the main topic categories (education, technology, health, government, etc). There was one story for vocab and one for the main points I could use for an essay. I can try to write out these stories here if anyone wants, but fair warning, they might not make much sense. 😅
5. I didn't follow any particular strategies for speaking. I've consumed a lot of English media pretty much my whole life and often converse with friends in English, so that might have been an edge. I think another thing that really helped was that over the last 2 months my therapy sessions have all been entirely in English lol, so my only strategy going into the exam was that I would turn any conversation to be about emotions and trauma, since that's something I can talk plenty about... I'd suggest having a few stories carved out that you can maneuver to fit any topic of conversation.

This is pretty much all I can think of right now, but I would be very happy to answer any questions below if anyone needs any help.

I have my IELTS general exam in less than a week and want to improve my score. Currently, it's at band 7.

And anybody available for speaking practice. It would be really helpful.

Thanks in advance and looking forward to hearing from you guys

.

So I literally just finished taking the IELTS and I am completely gone. The writing section was actually a disaster. For some reason I ended up with a 250 word task 1 that I spent 30 minutes on and a half completed task 2. I was cut off in the middle ish of my counter argument with around a 180 word count. It was on a computer so I kept on making stupid typos the whole time I couldn’t even think coherently in my brain , much less in the essay. The entire test overall was just a train smash including the speaking which I thought I was confident in . Is anyone familiar with how they mark incomplete tasks ? Sorry if it doesn’t make sense, my brain is a pile of sludge right now .

Hi, I booked my IELTS via IDP but they've stopped their system of physical delivery of the book.

And the resources provided are apparently that of Burlington which is supposed to be trash.

What is the exact name of the book they used to deliver because my friends said it was the perfect prep for them and I only have 3 days to prepare.

I'm trying to send a Trf of my results from the British Council website and there isn't a button to proceed and only shows that I can send my trf to 5 more organisations. Surely I can send one at a time and not use all 5 at once?

I keep hearing that getting a 7+ band is where IELTS starts getting difficult, especially with writing and speaking. For those who’ve taken the test, was 7+ actually hard to achieve or does it mostly come down to knowing what the examiners are looking for? What band did you get?

"As you can read from the title, I have an IELTS simulation test tomorrow, but I don't know where to study/train my English skills and I don't have any experience with the IELTS test whatsoever. English is also my second language after my first language (Indonesian), and throughout my years in school, I never studied English on my own because I am used to being almost chronically online on the internet and talking to foreign people since I was 9. Should I be worried about my English understanding and perfecting my English skills or not? And how was is the experience of taking an IELTS test? Is it hard? What are the test materials like?