I am proud to announce that brand new 30 complete IELTS practice tests were launched on our website this week. We released 15 General Training practice tests, and 15 Academic tests. Writing and pre-testing took 9 long months of work, because we wanted to release a mature, great quality product as close to perfection as possible, and also because in these tests we wanted to introduce some new helpful features our students requested.
The practice tests start with a ‘How To’ section, explaining the steps to practicing. You will see there are two possible ways you can use these practice tests: they are great for simulating the real exam, or for normal practicing.
Just like in the real IELTS test, there are 4 sub-tests (Listening, Reading, Writing, Speaking). We produced high-quality recordings for the Listening part, and there are also transcripts for all the recordings, with answers underlined. If Listening is a challenge, you can play a recording, follow it using a transcript to understand every word, and you will also see where the answers are located in sentences. Of course, in addition we provide all the answers on a separate Answer Sheet and you don’t have to read transcripts if you only want the correct answers.
We also included blank printable Answer Sheets that you can use to practice in copying your answers from the question booklet onto the Answer Sheet – this, too, is a skill that can be improved with a little work.
A new, useful feature is the Reading Answers Help. At times students can’t understand the reason why our correct answers are, indeed, correct. We created a complete section that explains all the Reading Answers and shows you the sentences or paragraphs in texts where they can be found. Using Reading Answers Help you will be able to understand the logic of the Reading section of the exam. After finishing a test, you will be able to fully analyse your answers.
Similarly to the previous practice tests, we included model responses written by an Examiner for all writing tasks.
For the Speaking sub-test in addition to Speaking tests’ questions we have recorded live interviews with the Examiner asking test takers questions. Every recording comes with a written Examiner’s Commentary that explores the strong and weak sides of each test taker, their strengths and weaknesses, what could have been done better, and at the end there is a marking section, where each student gets a score in 4 criteria (Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation) and an overall Speaking Band score. Listening to such recording and reading the Examiner’s Commentary will help you compare their performance to your own, and estimate your Speaking score in the real IELTS test. The students’ levels range from IELTS Band 5 to Band 9.
The practice tests are digital, in PDF format, and the recordings are in mp3, which makes the packages mobile- and tablet-friendly (you can study while commuting!), and they are also fully printable in high resolution.
