I Did the Real IELTS Test (Find Out My Score)

recently i decided to do a crazy experiment and with the ielts test i went down to dublin by two hours from where i live and i did the real ielts test because i wanted to test something that has been bothering me for many many years do me a favor don't skip ahead and look at the results all right don't skip ahead and look and think oh you got that result well you know a native english speaker who teaches ielts for a living should be getting a band nine um so you know it's kind of like lewis hamilton doing the driving test and passing the driving test it is not such a big deal because this is my job instead what i decided to do was this experiment so the ielts test is divided into four parts listening reading speaking and writing what i decided to do was for two parts of the test go and look at the most popular advice the most popular tips and tricks for that part of the test and follow that blindly and for the other two parts i looked up the common advice the most popular tips and tricks for those two parts of the test and decided to do the exact opposite so don't follow the advice do the opposite and then let's see what the scores should be so let's check out what happened so starting off with the listening test the two most common tips that you see on popular blogs and youtube videos are number one really focus on keywords so when you're looking at the questions focus in on the keywords the keywords will reveal the correct answer to you and the second tip is skip ahead when you finish a section go straight away and read the questions and try and find those key words so it's a very keyword driven way of doing the listening test and this is the most popular advice out there it's not the advice that we give at ielts advantage but it's certainly the advice that millions of people use um every test day so for the listening part i followed the gurus just did exactly what they said and i had to abandon that strategy at the end after the first section because i found it nearly impossible to focus on what i was doing a huge part of listening is focusing and being able to focus on the question and focus on the listening at the same time and you really have to do three things you need to read listen and think and decide the correct answer all at the same time and i think that i got the first question wrong because i was really focusing on keywords and then skipping ahead and trying to think about what is happening next instead of really just doing what i should be doing which is looking at the question and waiting for the listening and thinking about it more holistically so i think that i got the first question wrong and it was an extremely simple question it was a registration number a number plate on a car and i think i got that wrong because what i was doing was really focusing on keywords and thinking about what was coming next and what that did was it stopped me actually getting this really simple answer like the first question in the listening test is the easiest one i think i got that wrong and i paid a lot of money for this test and this you know this experiment and i thought i was thinking to myself after section one i better abandon this strategy of focusing on the keywords and then skipping ahead because i my mind was going blank i couldn't think straight and i couldn't focus on what i was doing so here's the result i ended up getting about nine for the listening test but if i had of maintained that strategy i definitely would have got much lower than a nine and really to be honest i didn't want to embarrass myself so i followed the common popular guru thinking and i think i got the first question wrong and i abandoned that and i would not recommend that to anybody because you really just lose focus and my mind was going blank and i couldn't really understand what was going on and that's as a native english speaker so i did get a band 9 but it was only because i abandoned the strategy after the first section so a pretty good start about nine so far but it was quite shocking how how difficult i find i find the first section and the first section is the easiest section moving on to reading and the three most common things that you will see online um about reading the popular tips and tricks are skimming scanning and keywords so all you have to do is skim the text scan the text look at keywords in the questions and then magically you're going to find the correct answer this is all kind of designed to trick your way into getting the correct answer somehow and to focus on doing it as quickly as possible it's really about time management that advice and i totally disagree with that advice because it is not a time management test it is a reading test so what i did instead was basically the opposite of that i didn't do any skimming i didn't do any scanning i did no keyword highlighting or anything like that what i did was carefully read the text really really carefully read it then i went to the questions and i basically applied the strategies that i teach um for each of the different types of questions thought about them very deeply read very carefully no skimming no scanning really thinking about the answer the correct answer to each question and i got i believe i got a hundred percent all of them correct i got a band nine as you can see up here um by following exactly the opposite of what the gurus teach um and not only that i got it all done by 20 minutes now that is not bragging anyone who is a native english speaker should be able to get a band 9 in reading um by doing that but if i was skimming scanning keywords i think i would have messed it up because a lot of the questions skimming is a waste of time a lot of the questions keywords is looking for keywords is a waste of time so by focusing on time management i actually would have wasted a lot of time ironically because good time management is not really about time management tips it is about becoming better at reading and reading carefully and deciding the correct answer based on your understanding of the text and your understanding of the questions and all of that skimming scanning keywords that kind of gets in the way of it now some of the strategies that i use do deploy some of those things but in a very limited way not answering every question in that way so doing the complete opposite of the gurus bandline the next one was speaking so i did the opposite of what i was supposed to do in speaking the opposite of what the top tips and tricks so again what i did what are the most common most popular tips and tricks for speaking they are for part one memorize answers you're going to get questions about your job you're going to get questions about where you live in your home so memorize some answers um i didn't do that um use idioms and phrasal verbs and um things like that i didn't use one single idiom the entire time i did so i was told to use idioms didn't use them at all use a very high level vocabulary didn't use high level vocabulary what i did was just answer the questions in a simple language as possible and only use high level vocabulary when i absolutely had to when there was no simple way of saying it um but you know where are you from i'm from the place that i'm from i didn't say i reside or i dwell in like i wasn't using really high level words when i could use simple words complex grammar didn't really focus on using the most complex grammar the most complex sentences or the most complex tenses i could think of if they asked me about the past i used the past tense if they asked me what i was thought about the future i would say like i think they might be doing this in the future or i said elon musk has big plans for this like i wasn't using really complex standardized grammar that you'll see online part five are part or number five i was told in part two using these popular strategies you must focus on the bullet points in part two you must address each of the bullet points if you don't talk about the bullet points you will not get a high score i didn't even look at the bullet points i just talked about the stuff at the top the topic at the top and i just talked naturally about that and i don't know if i used the bullet points or not but i didn't really consider them um and then the sixth popular piece of advice is part three is very formal it's very academic so you should use lots of academic words and talk about it in that kind of formal academic way i talked about it in a really informal non-academic very friendly conversational way so i did exactly the opposite of the advice and i got a bad mind um so i there's a lot of people out there that will tell you if you don't use idioms you'll get a low score that is completely false based on you know my experience doing the real test and at ielts advantage we've got like 12 ex-examiners who would agree with me on that and so who is right is your youtube guru right or is the actual examiner right um a lot of people will say if you miss a bullet point you will get a low score a lot of people say if you don't use high level vocabulary and complex grammar you will get a low score this is completely untrue and this was not because i'm a native english speaker and somehow my pronunciation was so magnificent or that i you know got a really high score it's not done on pronunciation alone it's not done on fluency alone it's not done on grammar alone it's not done on vocabulary alone you in order to get a band nine you need to be a band nine for everything and if you are lacking in what two of those things and you're going to get at least an 8.5 that didn't happen writing was the most interesting part so i have seen um other youtubers ielts youtubers going and doing the real test and getting 6.5 getting seven 7.5 in the writing and then blaming the examiner and blaming the writing or blaming the test and all sorts of things um i don't think that's right i think that's probably because their methods are not very effective and if you are a native english speaker and you're getting 6.57 in the ielts test then you're doing something seriously wrong and that's what i did what i did was i did a few things that are popular advice and i believe that they're seriously wrong so what did i do um i used high-level ideas so very common advice very popular advice about the writing test is make sure your ideas are very high level whatever that means they're impressive they would really impress the examiner number two make sure that your vocabulary is very very high level as complex and as high level and as many c2 and c1 words as possible never repeat a word always vary your language as much as possible that's that's very common advice number three make sure that your ideas are impressive that they impress the examiner in some way that the examiner will look at it and think um these are really impressive ideas and number four make sure that your grammar is very complex that you use many different structures that you use like things like conditionals and multiple different conditionals and you use multiple different types of tense and complex structures and everything this made writing the essay really difficult because a few problems came up number one it took me a long time to try and think of high-level ideas and i wasted a lot of time before i knew it like eight minutes had gone by and i was still thinking like what is a really high level idea then when i started writing what i noticed was there were certain words that i didn't know how to vary so one of the key words was hobby not hot there's only as few ways that you but it was a some people like high-tech hobbies some people like low-tech hobbies so the whole thing was about hobbies so what all i was doing while i was writing instead of thinking how do i write a clear essay what i was doing was thinking how do i change hobbies which really isn't that important the examiner is testing your writing the exam clear communication in writing they're not testing how many different variations of the word hobby can you put down so that made my job really really difficult um for part one i was trying to think of something that would impress the examiner um so i was trying to think of something that would be really interesting it was um write a letter to your boss uh about the dress code so to impress the examiner i wrote that i was working in a restaurant called hooters i don't know if you know this but hooters is like a restaurant where the all the ladies were very skimpy outfits and so i pretended to be a hooters girl and complain about my outfit and the men were harassing me and everything i thought that was funny impressed the examiner that way and i tried to use really complex grammar so um what i was doing was actually deleting good simple sentences with really effective simple grammar in it and trying to make it more complex so everything that i did by following the common advice the popular advice that made my job much more difficult and i got a band eight so i should have got about nine but because my job was made so much more difficult i was a full band below where i really should be and that's something that you should really think about you probably deserve a much higher band than you are currently getting but if you are doing even one of those things you're not bad at writing you're just making your life more difficult by following popular advice on youtube and on blogs that doesn't really help you get a high score because what you should be doing is instead of thinking of high level ideas try and think of simple ideas simple ideas are easy to write about easy to think about easy to explain easy to think of examples for high level vocabulary actually lowers your vocabulary score because you're trying to think of ways of varying your vocabulary and making it more complex and making your your job more difficult and probably your writing less clear impressive ideas it's just an extra thing that you need to think about you're running out of time you don't have time to check your work because you're spending all that time trying to think of impressive ideas and you're probably making grammar mistakes because you're making your grammar more complex so have a think about that by following the advice and listening i nearly messed up my listening test by doing the opposite i got a band 9 in reading in 20 minutes by doing the opposite in speaking i got a bad nine by doing what the gurus tell you to do or most of the gurus not all of them there's some good coaches and trainers online not criticizing all of them i know you guys think that i i'm overly critical but the reason why i'm overly critical is i spent 200 euro plus 100 euro getting my writing rechecked so that's 300 euros in test fees i spent 160 euros on a hotel i spent 50 euros on food breakfast and dinner because i had to go down and stay there spent another 20 euros on petrol i took half a day off work that cost me probably about 500 euros so close to a thousand euros in just doing this test and i know that you guys spend an equivalent amount of money and it makes it even worse for you guys because if you don't get the scores that you need that means that you can't go and work in that country of your dreams and achieve and earn the money that you deserve it's easy for me all i had to do was drive up the road and i'm back into my big house working in my nice job getting paid what i deserve most people doing the test when they follow this advice don't have that choice what they are told is you failed the test your scores are lower than you hoped for there's we're not going to tell you why and what people normally do what their normal reaction to that is i'm dumb i'm stupid i need to go and do more tips and tricks make things more complex more impressive ideas learn more idioms and then they go and fail again okay i need to find another guru and learn even more tips and tricks and hacks and shortcuts and then they fail again this is why i get so passionate about this because we get emails every single day from students saying i failed because they followed this advice this common advice if this common advice can make a native english speaker fail the test by getting a band aid in writing and doing the exact opposite leads to band 9 that might make you think and if you think oh my expertise as an ielts teacher and as a native english speaker and as you know an educated person from ireland that means that you know of course you would have got a band 9. go and look at other ielts experts from native english speakers who have done the test for real they're not getting by 9 and everything so makes you think doesn't it so hopefully you find this interesting if you did and you have questions about how do i actually get the scores that i need well you just follow exactly what examiners should show you or would advise you to do which is do the opposite to most of the stuff you see online why is it popular because that's what you guys want you want tips and tricks what you need is something completely different if you want something completely different feel free to get in touch with us and we will help you out as much as we can thank you very much hope that you find that interesting special thanks to the people at the ielts test center they were amazing they made me feel really comfortable um really professional they would did their best to like reduce nerves amongst the other candidates and and things like that it was really really professional and i'll probably make a follow-up video on what it was like to do the computer based test um if you want that or any other videos in the future feel free to subscribe or unsubscribe if you don't like the channel um and feel free to give the video a like or a dislike if you didn't think that this video was helpful thanks very much and hope to hear from you soon bye [Music] you

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 31,534

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Exam, IELTS Test, IELTS Writing, IELTS Speaking, IELTS Listening, IELTS Preparation, IELTS Reading

Id: Y2SJytX6Q4I

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021