Hi folks,

I'm doing a research for my Doctorate of Education at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. It's about the problems people are experiencing when taking IELTS test.

I badly needed your help and you can only help me by sharing your experience,comments and complaints about IELTS test.

Hope everyone who will read this will have a heart to share his experience.

It would be a great help.Thank you.

Regards,

I feel it effectively assesses a non-native-speaking student's language skills.

However, my comments:

Listening: if a student is located in a poor position in the examination hall, it's sometimes more difficult to hear the recordings.

Reading: you must take effective strategy classes to be able to score well here.

Speaking: although the examiner and the examination process is made as objective as possible, examiners are still human and sometimes switch off during parts of the interview. This is especially true when the examiner has to work through up to 18 or 20 candidates in one afternoon.

Writing: culturally Thais rarely write academic papers, even at Thai university, in a form similar to the requirements of IELTS. Words such as 'opinion', 'argue' and 'from your own experience' in the rubric often intimidate Thai candidates who haven't taken strategy classes.

I got a 9 on the IELTS a couple of years ago, my big problem was that they froze us to death here at the British Council in Chiang Mai, it can't have been more than 15 degrees in the room. It was extremely difficult to concentrate, write essays with frozen fingers etc. Would never have thought that this could be the biggest challenge at a serious exam!

(I am not Thai.)