The pursuit of higher education has led many students to seek opportunities abroad and IELTS (International English Language Testing System) has been their go-to option for considering education in a country where English is the main language of communication. The most popular countries where IELTS is accepted for university admissions are the UK, Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada, while some other European countries require it too.
IELTS, which is jointly managed by the British Council, IDP: IELTS Australia and Cambridge Assessment English, has the Academic and General Training sections with most students appearing for the former as they are appearing for undergraduate and postgraduate levels of education. The exam, which measures the ability of test-takers to communicate in major basic English language skills — listening, reading, speaking and writing — happens on four separate days every month in a year.
The Listening test consists of four parts, each with 10 questions. While the first part is concerned with social needs, the second part is focused upon situations related to educational and training contexts, and the third and fourth part is about conversation and monologue respectively. The Reading test consists of three sections, which includes multiple-choice questions, identifying whether the information is true or false, sentence completion, flow-chart completion and much more.
While in Writing, students are given the opportunity to organise and present data, describe the stages of a process, explore an object or an event or explain how something works, they are also made to critically examine a problem and give their solutions for the same. In the Speaking section, on the other hand, there are three parts. As part 1 lets the candidates introduce themselves and answer a wide range of topic areas, in part two students talk about a particular topic while being given a prompt. The examiner then proceeds to ask questions about the same. In part three, the candidate engages in a discussion with the examiner about more abstract issues which are linked to the topic in part two, the discussion lasts for two-three minutes. The Speaking section aims to assess the candidates’ fluency, lexical resource, grammatical range, pronunciation, etc.
The fees for the test ranges anywhere between Rs 14,000-Rs 15,000 depending on your preferred study destination. If you need to modify your test date, you must request a test day transfer at least five weeks before the scheduled date and pay the cancellation/postponement cost. For the transfer of the exam date, candidates must pay an administrative fee of Rs 3,300.
Though IELTS is conducted multiple times in a year, candidates are advised to book a slot keeping in mind their own admission timeline. Students usually appear for the exam three-four months prior to their application deadline.
Some students aiming to complete their Masters in the US, UK and other European countries are either awaiting or getting their results, and plan to move forward with the process of going abroad by late August-September 2022 before their academic year starts.
“I prepared for the exam in the month of December in 2021 and gave the exam in January. Your conversational skills need to be good, especially for the Speaking and Listening sections. As for the Reading and Writing sections, the focus is on passages and presenting information in your words while looking at an infographic or a pie chart respectively,” said Kaustubh Dhurandhar, a Mass Media graduate from Somaiya Vidyavihar, who has applied in universities across Belgium, Netherlands and Germany. “I got 6.5 bands in the exam which is good enough to pass IELTS and nine is the highest score that a student can achieve in the same,” continued Kaustubh who gave IELTS over TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) because many of his peers gave the former instead of the latter. “It's also important to keep your answers in bold letters so there are fewer chances of cutting your marks, that's something advised to us by our tutors during the preparation of the exam,” Kaustubh suggested and added that it's always better to not stress out over the Reading section as usually Writing is next after that and more time, and thinking skills have to be applied to it.
Vidya Parthasarathy, a Ux/UI Designer based in Mumbai, who is waiting for her IELTS results which will come out in the weekend said that she expects a higher score. “I am expecting to get 7.5-8 in the test though 6.5 is usually good enough,” said Vidya, who wants to pursue her Master's from London and added that the Writing section was tougher to her because of the time limit compared to the Listening section. “Because a lot of people I know appeared for IELTS, I gave the exam. That way it was also easy for me to reach out to them,” continued Vidya.
The upcoming IELTS exam will be conducted on March 12 as candidates would appear for both the Academic and General Training sections of the test. The results for the exam are usually declared within three-five days or a week. Candidates have to log in with their ID, password, passport number and test date information to view the results on https://ielts.idp.com/results/check-your-result
