IELTS tips from Daria, Band 8 in Academic Module

I’ve received tons of emails asking me the same question: “How did these people (our results competition winners) achieve such a good scores?”. And here is the answer – Daria Kurokhtina, who won the IELTS results competition in March with a jaw-dropping score of 8.0, shares her experience:

“My experience of IELTS preparation is not standard because I had only a week before exam for that.

I decided to use this restricted time frame for making myself familiar with the format of Reading and Listening parts. For that purpose I used IELTS past papers published by Cambridge University Press. I worked through all the available past papers, analysed my mistakes and thought about ways to avoid them in actual examination conditions.

As for Speaking and Writing parts, unfortunately I didn’t have any opportunities for practicing these skills with experienced IELTS tutors so I relied only on the techniques acquired when studying English at school and at the university.

My main piece of advice for candidates with limited time for preparation would be therefore to concentrate on the parts of the exam that they feel can be significantly improved in the short term.

Good luck to all the candidates! Best wishes to you and your extremely useful web-site!”