IELTS, What is it like?

So, I just finished my IELTS course a week ago. The course I took consist of 21 meeting in about 2 months. After taking this course, I have a clear idea about what IELTS is and hoping to share it with you :)

IELTS is an abbreviation of International English Language Testing System. Basically it is a test to evaluate your English proficiency. This particular test is widely acknowledged especially in Europe. 

The most striking difference between IELTS and other English proficiency tests is the type of questions. Usually, English proficiency tests will give you only multiple choices questions in listening and reading. This is not the case for IELTS. In IELTS, you have to deal with variety type of questions, such as list of headings and fill in the blank. Well, sometimes there are also multiple choices questions, but the proportion is very little compared to other English proficiency tests (Based on my experience, I might be wrong about this).

There are 4 part of this test :

1. Listening - 40 questions - 4 sections - 40 minutes
2. Reading - 40 questions - 3 sections - 60 minutes
3. Writing - 2 questions - 60 minutes
4. Speaking - 3 sections - 15 minutes

Okay, let's discuss it one by one!

Listening
This part is divided into 4 sections. Each section consists of about 10 questions (it may vary). Usually, the difficulty of the questions are increased as the section number increased. Listening in IELTS is quite tricky because they use a lot of rephrasing and therefore requires a lot of concentration.

Reading
This part is divided into 3 sections. Each sections consists of one passage and 13~14 questions. The passage is quite long (about 1.5 pages). That's why you are not advised to read all passages in detail. Using reading techniques like skimming and scanning will speed up your process in finding the answers.

Writing
This part is divided into 2 questions. In the first question, you are asked to describe a figure, usually a chart or table. You are strongly restricted to give any opinion here, and doing so will reduce your scores. The second question is the opposite. There will be some topic, and you must give your opinion about it. The advised duration are 20 minutes for the first question and 40 minutes for the second question.

Speaking
This part is divided into 3 sections. In the first section, the native speaker will ask you some general questions, like where do you live, your hobby, and your family. Then, in the second section, you will be given a cue card about something (for example, just go to this site http://www.ielts-mentor.com/cue-card-sample) and you should speak for 2 minutes about it right after making a short note for 1 minute about the topic. In the third section, there will be a discussion about certain issue and you should answer about 1 minute for each question.

In IELTS, the scoring is quite simple. In listening and reading, the formula is : correct answer / 40 * 9. In writing, there are 4 components for each question, and the second question weight 2 times compared to the first question. In speaking, there are also 4 components but I'm not sure whether the scoring is done for each section or every section at once. After all components are scored, they will round up the scores and produce the final score.

General Tip : Always pays attention to the instructions. Usually in every beginning of the section there will be a short instruction about how to answer the questions. It is very important to stick to the instruction because they will not tolerate any wrong way in answering.

Hopefully this post will give you a general idea about IELTS. I hope I can write more details about this in the future :)