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Special thanks to our French friend G. who told us what his Academic exam was like:

Listening

1) A real-estate information form to fill (with phone numbers and name spelling).
2) Sport venue locations to find on a map and table completion on them.
3) A gap-fills exercise about requirements for a master degree for South-American students (quite hard as they were speaking fast and we had to find “ideas” more than words).

Reading

1) Cow manure-made water filters (I found the text: click here to read), task type: a gap-fills exercise.
2) About Pioneer 10 & 11 satellites going astray, task type: heading matching.
3) Prehistoric research struggles between scientists in Australia, task type: multiple choice questions.

Writing

Task 1 (Report)
Report on a table showing visits to London in 1996 and 2001 by UK-residents and overseas visitors. Visitors were sorted out by categories (business, family, holidays, other).

Task 2 (Essay)
Machines are becoming very sophisticated. Workers are benefiting from that. Discuss to what extent good points overweight bad points.

Speaking

Interview
Discussion of bicycle.

Card
Explain how and when you were given a good advice (I quit smoking 2 years ago…)

Discussion
How to give advice to others and in particular to children and teenagers.

This is what our friend P from Vietnam had to say about recent Academic IELTS exam.

“Oh my God, it was terrible!

Listening

The listening was quite easy, but I didn’t do well because I couldn’t concentrate.
1) Part 1 I don’t remember.
2) Part 2 was about diving.
3) Part 3 was about a man asking about a course in zoology.
4) Part 4 was about perfume.

Most questions were filling the blanks. Except in part 4, all the questions were multiple choice. However, part 4 was not easy. I lost concentrate from the very beginning, and it was a disaster (maybe because I have been sick).

Reading

Reading test was even more difficult (in my opinion). The articles were simple, but the questions were not simple. I could only do well in passage 1.

Passage 2, I can’t understand. It pointed out some views of scientists. I was very keen to read the whole passage, but I still didn’t understand. I wasted a lot of time on this. Terrible!

Passage 3 was about English and international language. I could understand this article, so I think I did the matching headings well. But in matching task and fill summary form, I couldn’t do well (maybe because of lack of time).

Writing

Task 1 (Bar charts)
They gave us 2 bar charts, both had the same subject (the number of students studying each subject in a specific school), just different years (1990 and 2005). So I had no difficulty to combine, compare and contrast two charts.

Task 2 (Essay)
Some poor students and students from rural areas find it difficult to get access to university. Therefore university should make it especially easy for people from these backgrounds. In what extent do you agree or disagree?

Speaking

Well, I hope I will be fine in speaking test. The examiner is very kind, she choose all easy questions to ask me since I told her that I didn’t do well in the test.

However, I spoke pretty fast. If I’d slowed down, I would have paid attention to pronunciation. That is my weakness I think. I made a lot of mistakes in grammar, but it seems the examiner understood what I said.

I am afraid that there is no certain topic for each test. There were 4 examiners in for speaking rooms, so obviously, each person would have different topic. My topic was about education (pretty easy). My friends had topics about fashion and remarkable memories.”