You may remember Saroj as one of our IELTS Results competition winners, whose success we celebrated earlier this month. Saroj is a young man from Nepal who recently took an Academic IELTS test and got Band 7.5.
According to our tradition, Saroj was invited to share his experience preparing for the test, and you will find that the lessons he learnt in his preparation for IELTS can be useful to anyone studying for the test. Bonus tip: take note of the things he skipped but wished he had done, because YOU still have time to include them in your preparation sessions!
“I am writing to thank you for this website which has helped me immensely in my preparation for IELTS academic test which I have just completed and haven gotten back the results. Honestly, I used free resources from your website and others, and am genuinely in disbelief still that I did well.
Basically, the way I prepared was to practice the materials available on the website as much as possible. For writing, I would try to actually write an essay before reading the sample answer for that essay question or at least to have brainstormed ideas prior.
For reading, I would read through the questions first before actually reading the passages, in anticipation of the possible matching of the themes of the passage to a question.
I honestly feel I was inadequately prepared for the speaking section as I did not prepare for it much, but speaking out loud my answers prior to looking at the answers would be helpful.
The same strategy for the writing task 1 so generally, practising and testing ourselves prior to looking at the answers as compared to simply looking at the model answers would definitely make a difference. I suppose practising under time constraints would have helped me further in my preparation.”
Thank you very much, Saroj, for sharing your advice, and we wish you only the very best!
