My IELTS Indicator experience

hi uh i'm rv and i'd like to talk about my experience taking the ielts indicator exam so for the past few days i've received a couple of messages from random people um who'd also like to take the ielts exam but they don't know how to go about it so i'm making this video for you guys so i could just if another random stranger would message me i'll just send them a link to this video that would hopefully answer all their questions about the exam um so i took the ielts indicator it's sort of not really a new kind of exam it's um like two or three months ago i else released this type of exam for countries who um have their ielts centers closed so they did this so that students can still apply to their desired uh universities so they could still take the ielts safely at home i'm from the philippines and most well all of the ielts testing centers here are closed because of the strict lockdowns due to the corona virus so i had not really much of a choice to take the ielts indicator so i could meet my submission deadline because if the testing centers are open in your country they would advise you to go to those testing centers instead of taking the ielts indicator because not all universities and institutions except this type of exam you need to hop onto their website to check which institution accepts ielts indicator scores and it's better if you sort of call and contact your institution to make sure that they do accept it in my case i made sure they did accept it and i was good to go so there's not a lot of videos on this subject i'll try to keep this video short and informative i'll give you a brief rundown of what i went through the days leading up to my exam and the days after so i took my exam on a wednesday that's august the 5th and i received the mariah results like a week after it was august 11. it was pretty quick and um there's like two websites where you could take it through idp and the british council website i tried to initially book through idp because when you go on the ielts indicator website it would uh immediately redirect you to the idp website but there is an issue in their um payment like transition to the payment option i i reached i was able to create an account and i reached the last step it showed me that i had booked my exam but there was no option to pay so i was like okay maybe they're just going to email me but i never received the email and it gotten to the point where my booking was like cancelled because i wasn't i i couldn't like i wasn't able to pay for the test so i contacted their technical support and until now they have not responded so instead of booking through idp i booked through the british council website and i'll show you what what that what that would look like in a moment um so i i decided to share my experience because there's not a lot of videos on this subject uh the only video i found was from a mogus ielts instructor um and i'll share his uh video i'll share a link to his video in the description description box below um his video was like around two months ago i'm not sure which website he booked but he didn't um he didn't experience any payment issues um when he took when he booked through the website i'm not sure exactly which website but um for me and other people they have been experiencing some um issues on their website so i'll show you um let me go ahead and transition to the ielts page so i could show you all right so here um i'll show you okay so this is the guy and this is the only video i saw in regards to the subject i'll give you a link to his video below and he has a blog also so you could also check out his video so you could see his experience but i'll show you that other people have been experiencing the same issue here uh this guy named john he was like i have some troubles to make the payment how does it work and then like i commented i was like yeah same happened to me i was waiting for a payment prompt but i never got one so i did it through british council i'll give you a link also to their website ielts who accepts the ielts indicator and they give you a description what it is once a week and etc so i'll show you that when you go to their direct site it would take you to the idp page test format blah blah checklist yeah you need all these okay the book now let's try booking you to enter your country philippines submit oh cool it loads the british british council now they must have noticed that idp has been having some issues on their site because before when i would like click the country it would redirect me to the idb page but now it redirects you to the british council page okay so i booked mine through the british council so you go ahead and select your country and select your test date um for me i selected august 5 for my listening reading and writing test and my speaking test was a day before i would highly recommend that you do your speaking test before you're listening reading and writing so that you won't have any external distractions when you're taking your listening reading and writing exam because when you're done with a speaking test uh you wouldn't have to worry like for example if you book your test like the day after you might sort of get distracted when you're doing your listening reading and writing exam because you're worried about the test for next day as compared to if you're already done taking the test then once you take your listening reading writing test uh you would have like a clearer mind you would be able to concentrate more so yeah i definitely recommend that you book your uh speaking test a day before your listening reading and writing test so let's go ahead and do a mock booking i'm not actually going to submit this i'm just going to show you guys what it looks like so you select your test day and then it will give you a pop-up it's like when do you want to take your speaking test so here um there's no option to take it um a day after let's see the other days yeah it's usually two to three days before your actual test so you can take it um for for the other days you can actually take your speaking test on the day of your listening reading and writing test but i won't recommend that because you're probably gonna be tired so to conserve your stamina i recommend like booking your tests in different days so you'll have like the speaking test one day and then the listening and reading writing test on the other so let's go ahead and select a day select the day before and then you'll choose a time so here you can see uh for me i select the time that was available back then was i think it was like 4 30 p.m and the speaking test only took like 15 minutes they'll give you a zoom link so you'll be required to download zoom make sure it's compatible in your laptop and another thing to take note of is you can't take the ielts indicator exam on your phone you need to take it on your laptop or a computer so um here if you select the time make it's in military format so three o'clock here that's not three pm that's actually 3 a.m so you need to go ahead and select here this is like the most yeah that's the only time available in the afternoon and then it leads to the evening so the earliest available time in the afternoon is this is 5 40 pm okay so blah blah blah and then the test fee is 149 in my country's currency that would be like around 7 000 pesos so you'll be prompted to create an account i won't go through the steps because i already created an account once you've created an account they you'll receive let's see you'll receive like a notification of account creation and then you will be prompted to proceed and complete the um payment section so i paid with my credit card and after that you will receive an email a confirmation of your ielts indicator registration so it would give you the instructions of what to do how many minutes are allocated for each section of the exam and uh you will be given like a link on the download for the safe exam browser so uh for the safe exam browser you need to like what what this is is and make sure it makes sure that you're not cheating because here you're also required to read their terms and conditions and there's a section here that tells you that there's a possibility that a proctor would access your webcam via the safe exam browser to make sure that you're not cheating so let's try to look for that section here it's email practice so when you're taking the test you're not allowed to use any notes or materials from any kind of source you need to make sure that you're alone in the room the room is quiet and empty you can't look away from the screen too often um you're not allowed to use the vpn or change the ip address and other stuff here as well so i'll show you what the safe exam browser looks like it looks like this and once you're done downloading this will pop up um when you click on next it will check your system let's go ahead and do that we'll do the blah blah blah make sure that your laptop has the required specifications there we go and then when you click next we'll do the microphone test uh your micro your the black bar needs to be uh within the green thing then the camera so since i'm doing a video recording with obs studio it's sort of using my webcam but what would happen is you would see like a prompt here and you would see your um what your webcam what what your webcam is showing and then you'll click next and then it will prompt you to log in so the instructions here they tell you like a day or two before your test you need to do a sub check and um this one this wasn't really clear in the instructions i received because i booked it like two weeks ago so i booked the test uh around this was yeah july 16 so that was like uh more than two weeks ago i guess yeah that was like three weeks ago from august 5 and then i kind of got worried because i never received my log in details i was like well i'm supposed to do a sub check but how can i do a sub check when i did not receive any login details so i contacted their um technical support i was like worried i was like uh yeah what's going on and then the tech person responded that oh your test date is still on august 5 and you'll receive all your instructions 48 hours before the exam and yeah i pretty much did received all my so um for my speaking test i received the instructions test was on the fourth and i received my instructions on the first so i'll go ahead and show you what that would look like so let's see here speaking there we go speaking login details so you're required to download zoom it would only take 15 minutes but i was surprised because when i went through the test it like we finished earlier i think two minutes earlier and the examiner was pretty happy with my answers it went pretty smoothly i think it's i haven't tried taking a computer-based ielts or a um paper-based ielts i only the first time i took ielts was through the indicator so i'm pretty sure it's more or less the same with compared to any ielts exam it would just be conducted via zoom and uh you need to log in at least five minutes before your scheduled speaking test time otherwise they will reschedule your test so uh for me i sort of logged in 30 minutes before the test time and the proctor the examiner she came on like five minutes early we did the identity checks so when you're taking the speaking test or the reading listening and writing exam make sure you have your passport because uh seb would also require you to upload your passport here or id and so we did the identity check she asked me to show her to show my passport on the webcam and then i did and i read my passport number out loud and then we did the exam and it's pretty much more or less same she asked me the basic ielts speaking questions you know like the three parts where the first part is the introduction the second part would be sort of a card main topics and the third part would be your opinion so you could just google ielts speaking questions at the end of this video i'll give you links to resources that helped me prepare for my ielts exam and i'll also share like what my band scores are but for my speaking band score i got the perfect band score of nine i was like actually surprised because before i started practicing i was pretty much bad at expressing myself spontaneously i mean i i'm fluent i'm pretty much fluent in english but there's like a huge difference in like talking to your friends compared to spontaneously speaking when someone asks you forced questions like you might experience like a point where you sort of freeze and sort of try to think about what you want to say and yeah you can just google it and then yeah for the second part with the card she did a screen share via zoom and i would see the questions so as i mentioned before in their terms in agreement you're not allowed to bring a piece of paper when you take the exam but for the speaking test you are allowed because in the second part of the test you will need to um write down the answers to your questions and then sort of like describe it to her so um i'm trying to remember what my questions were it was like two weeks ago so i i kind of forgot um i remember i think she asked me about um [Music] what was the last part the thing was the question was who do you know um do you know anyone who often flies and then i answered my professor because he works with the university they uh send him to do uh meetings in the other university branches in manila and so on and so forth um i forgot uh what was that yeah i forgot the topic card question that was given to me that was like two weeks ago i should have written it down but more or less it was that and yeah i aced that part of the exam because i got like a band 9 which is great so anyway after that is the um listening reading and writing part of the exam and the listening part was fairly straightforward once you click on sub uh let me see if i could sort of i can't like go through the sub pages again because i'm done taking the test i can't like exactly show you what it looks like but i'll try to draw it from memory via ms paint all right okay there's my mouse okay so this is the browser and then you'll see like three prompts here and they would say like listening listening to chu chun chun jin okay so i would say like listening and i would go like um reading and it would go like writing and there's like a prompt here let's go like next next next and i would give you like details like blah blah blah and then instructions and then there would be like a prompt here read instructions and then take test so once once once like you read the instructions it would display the check mark and then you're allowed to take the test and then hit next after so um the way the test is organized you do the listening first the reading next and the writing and i forgot to mention this when you're taking the test make sure you have good enough internet connection because when i did the sub-check um before you take the test you need to do a sub-check and what that is is and make sure that your um you have the requirements to take the test when i did my sub check when i reached the last page i wasn't connected to an ethernet cable so my internet sort of like stopped for a second and then the button grayed out and i couldn't proceed and i was like oh my gosh what do i do and i had to email their technical support because it was like the buttons grayed out i can't i can't proceed what do i do so i exited sub and then reloaded it and it prompted me for a password they i kind of like the british councils like because their technical support is very fast they respond promptly come unlike idp where until now i haven't received a response from their tech support in regards to their payment page but with the british council they respond like one or two days after you send them an email and they're they're able to help you out so i would recommend that when you do take your test make sure that you're connected to your ethernet cable um the secure exam browser it does have like safety features just in case you are taking the test and then you disconnect accidentally in the middle of your test um it's not like the browser would like exit and then submit your test um what happens is the browser would store the data and then once you reconnect to the internet that's when it would sort of send the data to their to their server so they have like that safety feature in place so if ever your your internet is wonky on your test day and you experience that sort of problem um make sure that you're you're connected to the internet like minutes before your test exam ends or else like all your answers won't be submitted so that's the only thing i could say but yeah and also for the speaking exam it's conducted via zoom what i would recommend is make sure you have a friend and then call your friend and do like mock exams via zoom ask your friend to check your audio quality because i remember i did a group uh study class speaking class i subscribed to like e2 language and book one of their um grip classes and i remember yeah i booked one of their group classes with graham he's an awesome instructor anyway i remembered like one of my classmates uh he was sort of like an urdu speaker but he had an accent and you could still understand him but his internet connection and audio quality was so bad that you can barely understand him you need to concentrate really well to get what he was saying so it wasn't solely the fault of his accent it was mostly the fault of his audio quality so when you're taking the speaking exam make sure you invest in a good headset i think he was just using his laptop microphone uh make sure you or like get a cheap microphone test it on zoom call your friend ask your friend is your audio quality good so that the examiner would easily understand you so you won't have to go through that technical issue because that guy he took the indicator exam he had high band scores for his reading writing and listening he got like bands of seven and eight but for his speaking he got like four and he tried to dispute it but um in their sort of terms and conditions you can't really dispute indicator tests you can only dispute a computer driven ielts or the paper test so he had no choice but to retake the ielts exam again so make sure that your internet connection is good and you have you have good audio quality for the speaking exam so that the examiner could understand you okay now where were we we're talking about oh the safe exam browser so for the listening reading and writing part it's basically like that uh before you take the test it would prompt you to read the instructions then it would then you would read the that would allow you to take the test so you click on next and what it would look like is um yeah it would basically look like this you could just um type in ielts listening in the search box for youtube and you could see that there's like different types of um there's like full tests mock tests available so you can practice on that but more or less it the secure exam browser would look like this um it would the audio would immediately play once you hit next it would be like it would go like uh this is the ielts test the listening test uh and they will give you the instructions and it would give you time to read the questions before it would play the audio so it would go like you have half a minute to read questions one to ten and then after that the audio would play so it would go like the two speakers or whatever and then uh you can click on the section so you could click on there's like four sections there's like a next button it it doesn't really look like um this exactly but more or less it's similar so it looks like let me go ahead and print screen this and then like so i could like from memory draw what it looks like right so it looks like that and there's like the bottom section there and once you're once you like marked a question all right so let's go once you like marked a question this thing at the bottom would like tell you which questions you have like answered and then i think there was like a volume button on the side so there's like a volume here you could just adjust the volume and then aside from that there was like a button that would go like that and that so you could it's divided into like four sections i guess so it would look there's like another bar and then you would be on this section and there's like a set of questions and it's like 40 questions in total and then you just like click next so even if the audio is playing you could just click forward to see the other questions and yeah you could click back but i would recommend like um when the audio is playing make sure that you're on the page for those questions otherwise you'll get lost but yeah you do have the ability to click back and forth throughout the pages all right so after that is the reading for the reading you have the ability to highlight the sections in the um in the text and this is really handy it saved me a lot of time um you can't really choose different colors i'm not sure how if if that feature is available maybe you can but for me when i took the test the color was only yellow so i used this tool often during the reading exam because there were some like challenging parts like a lot of names and i needed to highlight the names and make sure that i could answer the questions accordingly so yeah that's like the reading for the writing exam it's pretty straightforward i received the easiest graph ever it was a bar graph and um yeah i was able to answer it with no problems so for the writing exam you'll for me i take the ielts academic i don't think there's a general ielts indicator test it's mostly for academic because it's mostly for students who are trying to apply to universities um but yeah for the academic there's the you need to describe a graph or a chart or a flow process and then the next is your opinion so i was able to answer both i forgot i'm sorry i forgot the questions i received i don't know i i didn't know i would be making this video that's why i didn't like bother to write it down or remember the questions and after that uh you'll be done and then it would tell you you submitted your whatever your questions and then you're good to go and you just have to wait for your results for a week after so for me i was like trying to catch up to a deadline i had to email them i was like hey i know you really release your results in in like a week after but i need to have a confirmation email from you that i took the test so i could send it to my school and tell them that hey i took the test but um the results would be delayed so i was like it was possible to receive a confirmation email that i've completed the test and they were kind enough they were like yeah you could send this email over to your um university telling them that you have taken the exam so that they could like extend your application or like give you the offer letter and sort of just wait for the ielts exam to come through so here's my results boom i got a listening of 8 reading of 7.5 writing of 70.5 and speaking of 9. overall my band scores are 8 which is great that was more than enough that was required for my application uh so yeah that's pretty much good and i'll share the resources that i used to help me prepare for the test so the first is uh sevis it's like a it's like on facebook it's an online thing and um you could just they had a promo where you could pay like i think was like 3 000 pesos or less i forgot how much it was and you could take your take their classes unlimited until you pass the exam so i did that promotion and um yeah i'm not allowed to go into the page to show you what they share but it's pretty affordable and pretty great because they send you sort of materials every day they give you a schedule and group classes and i mostly attended their listening classes because i needed sort of um i needed practice for the exam and what i recommend is to to just practice every day and that would help you because like before i did all of this i tried to take a mock exam and i just conducted it myself because i think the ielts page they has like a mock exam here somewhere and i did it and i got like a band of 6.5 and i wasn't too happy about that so that's why i decided to sign up for like training in ielts because there's sort of weird it does like test your english capabilities but you need to know how to answer the exam so that because it's time based you only have such a short amount of time to answer it so even though i'm like pretty fluent in english when i first took a mock exam it was like around 6.5 or 6 something but after like i figured out how to do the exam how to answer it and what to look for in the exam then yeah i i pretty much got a really good score so you could like message their page i think this is only available in the philippines but i don't know if you're outside the philippines you could try asking if you could join otherwise you could try this other site uh it's e2 language and they have free resources and pretty much i went through everything so you can see that there's not much here in my study pathway because i i took all their practice tests so i'll show you what it looks like so like that yes no not given you could click start and then you it would give you a text and basically you could just practice and they have a lot so i'll show you that um i'll show you that i have see i've completed most of it so every day i was just practicing on e2 language i practiced the listening the writing everything um i actually bought one of their uh packages it included a mock test it was around uh they had a sale so it was around 50 it also included like speaking sessions and writing sessions writing feedback and speaking feedback so let me just go through this quickly with you so yeah it was pretty accurate they were able to predict i got like speaking of nine it's like boom and then reading writing seventy point seven point five so it's not too far from what their mock test predicted so yeah you could check um you could check your answers and stuff because they would actually check your mock test in the speaking test so they give you your scores uh they have they have a lot of resources here so here um especially with speaking because they have like yeah you can see i went through everything they have like topic toolkits and they have a set of questions that you could ask your friend to ask you so you could practice your speaking and then they also have vocabulary so this is a really good site i definitely would recommend e2 language their instructors are also great i took a couple of their group classes for the group classes um it's like a bit extra you pay 15 but you know it's sort of worth it because i learned a lot especially from instructor graham he was he's great um he was able to give me some um tips and it worked well and some ways to better practice and it essentially just involves like you recording yourself and making sure that um you're able to fluently answer the question so i guess i covered everything um for the ielts so yeah if you have any questions you could pop a comment below um pretty much that's it thank you for watching this video i hope this video has helped you like to prepare and expect and to know what to expect uh for the ielts indicator once again i recommend that you check with your institution if they accept ielts indicator scores otherwise if your testing center is open where you are i recommend just to go to the testing center because for other applications like visa applications that's what they're gonna look for um is like the regular ielts score but for my institution they said that the indicator was fine so i don't have to worry about that so thanks for watching this video i hope it helps and yeah that's it

Channel: Marvie Gasataya

Views: 5,355

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Indicator, IELTS indicator, ielts indicator, E2 Language Review

Id: ZEtPYYyeCRY

Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020