IELTS blog

Can’t find a good place to study for IELTS? Struggling to fit IELTS prep into your schedule? Dr Ammar Hadi Kadhim, a neurosurgeon living in Iraq, offers a solution. He achieved the band score he needed with just one month’s practice using Road to IELTS. Here’s his story…

The IELTS test is critically important for most people. It can make the difference between studying overseas and staying at home; between having your immigration status confirmed or denied — perhaps for ever. So, with your IELTS test coming up, you should study non-stop to get the result you need, right? The evidence suggests that this is not the case. You need to study, yes, but you need to study strategically.

IELTS is a challenging test. You can reduce the stress by making sure that you understand all the rules and have all the practicalities under control for the test day. Here are four key points, and some do’s and don’ts.

There is clear evidence that learning the various task types in IELTS is the quickest and most effective way of improving your band score. We recently conducted research on over 100,000 British Council candidates using Road to IELTS (our official IELTS preparation product) to do just this. We found that after using the program for just six hours, candidates’ scores in the Reading module activities improved by, on average, 64%. Clearly, in six hours there can be no significant change in their level of English; their improvement came from learning how to answer the questions. This can be achieved in a relatively short period of time.

“I don’t have the time to sit down and work on mock papers. And I don’t find it useful to do them bit by bit. Life is too distracting!” wrote Jorge Gibellini, an Argentinian IELTS candidate who needed an IELTS 7.0 for his master degree. Many candidates, like Jorge, are too busy with their academic study, day job and family commitments. And when they are finally free to sit down to begin their preparation, they are already too tired to take it all in.