​​ DON'T USE 'ACTUAL' IELTS TESTS Following a test, many p | Imkon Forum

​​ DON'T USE "ACTUAL" IELTS TESTS

Following a test, many people want to ‘help’ others and so try to remember parts of the test to share online. For the writing and speaking tasks, these so-called ‘actual tests’ become filtered through the candidate’s language level, memory, and their own views of how test questions are written. Small changes have a big impact in test writing, so such materials cannot be seen as representative of the real test. Furthermore, the sharing of such questions leads to a belief that you can predict the test question and learn answers. If this is your approach, you will remain stuck at a low score. Even worse, with the reading and listening tests, people try to find articles on a similar topic online and then write their own test questions. The resulting tests are a confusing mix of guessable or impossible questions and overly technical and complex passages. Rather than admitting they have written the materials themselves, people share these tests and claim that theirs are ‘real’ while those in the Cambridge books are not, thus feeding the idea that ‘Cambridge is trying to trick you.’

Such materials undermine your trust in the test as well as your trust in your own ability to improve.
Furthermore, they mislead you when it comes to the skills you must develop and use and the language you must learn. The real enemy here is not the test, it is the materials that trick you into believing myths about IELTS and get in the way of your preparation.

Unreliable resources are also poor language models If we consider just two questions taken from a reading passage from one of these ‘Recent Actual IELTS’ books, you can hopefully see that there is an even bigger problem: they contain many English language problems.

There are language problems connected to grammar in every option and the stem of the questions does not fit grammatically with the options given. There are also vocabulary problems in most of the questions, with poor collocation a
particular problem. These feature in phrases that are intended to act as synonyms that ‘translate’ phrases in the passage. Thus, these materials not only prevent you from improving and practising reading skills, but they also interfere with the language you are learning.

Source: The Key to IELTS Success
Pauline Cullen 2017


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