A hilarious source on what it takes to ace IELTS
IELTS Hacker Blog
By Olga S, Student, Blogger, Tutor
Brighton, UK
How I got 8.5 IELTS after travelling by train for 12 hours and missing my speaking exam slot
If this does not inspire you to keep going, I don't know what will.
If you live in a God-forgotten village in Southern Ukraine, chances are you are have made peace with having to travel long hours before a first sight of civilisation flashes by the window of your dad's Volga. But if you are trying to move out of said village in Southern Ukraine, and to relocate to nowhere else but Great Britain to study at the university of your dreams, you are in for a ride of your life.
It is 02.40 am, somewhere in the not so early spring of 2012, and I am in the middle of what can only be described as severe insomnia. Ironically, I am also in the middle of a night sleeper train that is taking me some 400 miles up north to Ukraine's Main IELTS testing centre, where in just a few hours my international student status will be decided upon, once and for all.
I arrive at said location, accompanied by my biggest cheerleader (also known as my mum), and follow a long queue
of eager youth whose hopes to squeeze in some final study while they wait for their passport scan are as high as ever.
We enter a cold classroom with tiny wooden desks and sparse natural light. The wall to my left demonstrates a blown out periodic table. Mendeleev's portrait next to it looks highly unimpressed. There are no clocks around me in any appropriate directions of gaze and it makes me grumpy.
I arrive at said location, accompanied by my biggest cheerleader (also known as my mum), and follow a long queue
of eager youth whose hopes to squeeze in some final study while they wait for their passport scan are as high as ever.
We enter a cold classroom with tiny wooden desks and sparse natural light. The wall to my left demonstrates a blown out periodic table. Mendeleev's portrait next to it looks highly unimpressed. There are no clocks around me in any appropriate directions of gaze and it makes me grumpy.
''I did not know whether I should laugh, or cry, or both. Conscience won and I chose neither.''
I am sat in a far right corner of the room and I can hardly hear the tape recording as Listening commends. My favourite pens have been taken away on grounds of looking too comfortable and I am now scraping paper with a patchy roller-ball. In the middle of Reading, some staff member slides a note on my desk addressed to someone else with a similar last name regarding a change of their Speaking exam slot. I get distracted for 10 minutes trying to figure out what this all means.
I turn in the note as mis-addressed, and assume my speaking slot is intact. When I turn up four hours later, turns out that some well-meaning bureaucrat did make changes and I am two hours late. I cut the queue and enter a room with a grumpy interviewer who thinks it's all my fault. He hands me my speaking topic. The paper says, Describe the last time you were late. At this point, I do not know whether I should laugh, or cry, or both. As it happens, conscience wins and I choose neither.
Flash forward a few months later. I am sat at my laptop, freely abusing my refresh button and more than dedicated to, if necessary, crash the IELTS results website. As soon as I get distracted and let go of browser abuse, the server convulses in final defeat and spurts out my scores. I am not too sure if I am seeing it right. It reads, Listening 9.0; Reading 8.5; Writing 8.5; Speaking 8.0.
It takes me four years to realize how that happened.
Finally, I am ready to share.
It takes me four years to realize how that happened.
Finally, I am ready to share.
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So how did I get an 8.5 IELTS when the whole world went out of its way to stop me?
My IELTS results were not a mistake. Far from a system glitch, or a gift from above in lieu of 18 years of Soviet suffering (still waiting for a reimbursement on that one), my 8.5 was a result of my prep.
A prep that somehow was so helpful, so fool-proof and so profound, that it withstood the test of everything else suddenly going very very wrong. Despite my lack of sleep, the test's poor organization, and my falling out of favour with examiners as a result of it, I got a score that got me into a top 20 UK university directly into the course of my dreams.
It took me three years to realise that the way I was prepping for IELTS must have been pretty unique. Beforehand, I kept thinking that everyone else must have been doing the same.
After speaking to hundreds of international students who were attending my Foundation course, I realised they didn't.
In the past few months, I have deeply analysed my IELTS prep and have written from scratch a unique seven day course that features the best of my self-realised techniques that really truly work. Benefit from it. Hack the system. Check it out NOW.
A prep that somehow was so helpful, so fool-proof and so profound, that it withstood the test of everything else suddenly going very very wrong. Despite my lack of sleep, the test's poor organization, and my falling out of favour with examiners as a result of it, I got a score that got me into a top 20 UK university directly into the course of my dreams.
It took me three years to realise that the way I was prepping for IELTS must have been pretty unique. Beforehand, I kept thinking that everyone else must have been doing the same.
After speaking to hundreds of international students who were attending my Foundation course, I realised they didn't.
In the past few months, I have deeply analysed my IELTS prep and have written from scratch a unique seven day course that features the best of my self-realised techniques that really truly work. Benefit from it. Hack the system. Check it out NOW.
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