Jasmeen’s 3 basic steps to IELTS Band 8.5
Jasmeen is a delightful young lady from India, whose mother tongue is Hindi. She took IELTS a few weeks ago and scored Band 8.5, with two straight 9’s in Reading and Listening. This certainly isn’t an IELTS score we get to see every day, and so we simply had to ask Jasmeen for her best IELTS tips.
Here’s what she said YOU can do to follow her footsteps to success:
“Preparation for any exam requires 3 basic steps:
1. Understand the requirements and grading criteria of the exam.
2. Gauge your level on a practice test to come up with a strategic study plan based on your score, the desired improvement and study material available.
3. Dedication and patience is the key, stick to your schedule and practice daily.
The basics for preparing for IELTS reading and listening is making the least number of mistakes. Therefore, aim for reducing the incorrect answers rather than looking for a specific band score. When you reduce your wrong answers daily, the band score rises automatically.
In addition, examine your weak spots i.e. question types you frequently lose marks on. Once you are able to correct your own mistakes, you will be able to find faster methods and tricks to solve those types of questions thereby ensuring a perfect score on these sections.
Moving on to the other modules. I believe Writing and Speaking can be prepared together. If one is good at organizing and expressing their thoughts in English in writing, then they can surely do the same in Speaking and vice versa. The key here is to be able to logically explain your viewpoints.
In addition, writing is graded on 4 criteria as mentioned in the IELTS exam guide. So make sure to fulfill all of criteria to score high. That would be completing the task by answering the entire question in full, using proper linkers and connectors to make sure your essay is developed and bound properly, keep the grammatical and spelling mistakes to the minimum and ensure using diverse range of words to express the same thing (synonyms, idioms and vocabulary).
For speaking, practice daily and record you self to review your fluency and pronunciation also don’t forget to time your responses especially for the cue card.
Last bit of advice, do not forget to practice with pencil and do a full IELTS test before exam day, as erasing and writing again might consume more time then one would imagine.
I was able to score high using the above mentioned approach and I hope others reading this would benefit from my experience.
Good luck to all the test takers!”
