 Hello my people, my name is Meacham, welcome to the Score Channel and today we're going to explain to you everything that you need to know about the IELTS English test. A while back I made a video asking which test should you take, the IELTS or the TOEFL and since then we've been recommending that most people take the IELTS for university admissions. But we keep getting asked questions about the exam, what's it like, how many parts are on it, how difficult is it, what kind of exercises are there. So we're going to answer all of those questions today. We'll go section by section but let's start first with the basics about the test. The IELTS academic, and you need to take the academic, never take the IELTS general, is an English test that's run by Cambridge that is used to determine if your English is good enough for admission to university. The test can be done on paper or on computer but most people are taking the test on the computer these days. You do have to go to a physical center, there is no at home option for the IELTS. There is also an option for special accommodations if you have learning disabilities or difficulty reading or hearing due to some physical impairment you can request a special version of the test. It'll be on paper and you'll have to plan well in advance because the test center has to order this from Cambridge and it takes longer to arrive. Now the IELTS marks its sections out of nine points. There are four separate scores, one for reading, listening, writing and speaking and then those will be averaged to give you a final score out of nine. For most universities, an average score or an overall score of 6.5 is good enough to get in. Some more demanding programs may ask you for a seven. Sometimes universities put minimum requirements for different sections so make sure you pay attention to those. Most commonly I see a 6.0 or a 6.5 on the writing section in particular. So when you start the test, the first section that you're going to take is the listening section. Listening on the IELTS is pretty easy. You'll have four separate audios and a total of 40 questions. Before you start listening to the audio they give you time to look at the next questions that are coming up and there's even breaks in the audios to let you look at the next set of questions. This makes it really easy to plan ahead as you take the test and know exactly what you're listening for. Where the listening part gets a little difficult is in the types of questions. Most questions on the IELTS are fill in the blank. There are some multiple choice questions but for the most part you're going to write in answers and how that works depends on each task. I cannot stress this enough. Read the instructions. Sometimes they'll ask you for a single word. Sometimes it'll be two words. Sometimes it'll be a word and or a number. Sometimes there's a correct answer but it's one word too long and it doesn't work so you have to pay attention to the instructions. But one of the advantages of doing fill in the blank questions is that you can generally take a look at the context and figure out what the answer for example if I saw a sentence like this I would easily know that in that blank there's probably some adjective that describes the car. And since the word before is and I know it's going to start with a vowel. After the listening section you'll be sent directly to the reading section. Reading consists of three texts and a total of one hour to answer another 40 questions. Similar to the listening there are different kinds of exercises with different sets of instructions. A lot of times there are multiple multiple choice questions where you may have five or six answers and eight options to choose from. Be careful with some of these because in some cases you can repeat your answers but in other cases like the headings exercises you can only use each heading once. Another form of question on this part of the test is the true false not given question. You got to watch out for these because sometimes they call them yes no not given and if you write yes instead of true or false instead of no that will be incorrect. That's a really mean thing to do isn't it? Now both the listening and the reading part spelling does matter. K-N-A-I-D-E-L-K-N-A-D-L. There is a little bit more flexibility for spelling errors in the listening part. Generally speaking since you'll be using words that are in the text your spelling should be perfect on the reading part. The other thing that will help you with reading is that each set of questions follows the order of the text so the first set will typically be about the first page and the second set about the second page and so on. Once you finish the reading and listening you'll be sent to the writing portion of the test. This part has two tasks the first one will give you a piece of visual data for example this chart from my video of why Peruvian education sucks. Based on this data you'll need to write a response that describes the data and explains the trends or tendencies that you see. If you need help with that check out the live stream that I did last week where I took one of those charts from that video and used it as a prompt for the task one writing. But part one is only one third of the grade so don't make it your primary focus. You want to make sure that you allocate time for the second part. You get one hour to complete both tasks but they don't strictly divide the time so if you're not careful you could spend too much time on part one and not leave yourself enough time to work on the part that is the majority of your grade part two. Part two works very much like most other essay prompts but the big difference is that they ask you to consider both sides of the argument. You want to be careful to avoid sounding like you're contradicting yourself you need to have a clear position when you take these tests. So dedicate one of your paragraphs to talking about the other side's views but then explain why they're wrong by refuting those ideas you acknowledge them but you stay true to your position. This makes your writing sound more coherent and it'll generally help you get a better grade. Something else you should do is take a look at the rubrics for these tests. I've left them in the description below so you can check out the rubrics for both writing and speaking which is the part we need to talk about now. The last part of the test is the speaking test. You may take it the same day either right before or right after your regular test or you might take it on a different day depending on how your test center schedule works. But the speaking portion on the IELTS is probably the easiest test I've ever seen. I mean honestly I don't want to make them make it harder but it's kind of a joke. For the most part you'll just talk with somebody and there's one section of the test that has a very specific task where they ask you to sort of talk about a time where you've had a single experience. If you can do that for two minutes which is extremely easy you'll be fine. If you need examples of that check out the Duolingo English test speaking workshop video I did. That test actually copied the IELTS part two exactly to the point where I would call my lawyers if I were the IELTS. So what you see there for that part works just as well for the IELTS and those will help you out a lot. Now earlier I mentioned there was no at-home version of the IELTS but they did launch a new test last year called the IELTS indicator which is meant to compete directly with the Duolingo English test or even the TOEFL at-home test. But the big difference is that it's not a full version of the IELTS like the TOEFL at-home is for the TOEFL. Not too many universities are accepting the indicator test and I would recommend against taking it for now since there's just not enough acceptance of it to justify paying the money. If you're still not sure whether you should take the TOEFL or the IELTS check out the video that I made on that a couple of months ago and if you need some additional support with these tests check out the live stream playlist because I've covered several parts of these tests including speaking and writing and while there's differences from test to test a lot of those skills are transferable. Next week I'm going to be talking about the TOEFL exam and giving you everything you need to know about that one so that you can make the right choice for yourself. If you need help preparing for the IELTS or the TOEFL or any other test hit us up with prepwascore.com because we've been helping people get ready for the IELTS and the TOEFL all year to some outstanding results and we'd be happy to help you too. I'll see you next week.