The proof that hard work and talent pay dividends

Everybody

Here is the brilliant Belgian achitect Jean Luc who illuminated my June/July 2006 IELTS course. By all means, go to ieltscommunity12 on:
www.ieltsworld.blogspot.com
and see his final post dated 20 July 2006. This student carried that blog almost single-handed. He 'only' needed a band 6.0 in his Academic IELTS to do a Master's in Project Management with the British University in Dubai. He expected to get a band 7.0 overall. As a matter of fact, he achieved band 8.0 overall. Jean Luc, I salute you!

Here is his (unedited) report:

The Professor Tony's diet was quite tough, but efficient. I got the results this afternoon and I would say that I am almost satisfied.

Listening: band 7
Reading : band 9
Writing : band 7
Speaking : band 8

Overall band score: 8

A short analysis.

Listening: the part of the test I was the less comfortable with despite I went through (even several times) all the exercices available in the Learning Zone. There is nothing difficult, all answers were given, but.... Only one recommendation for the future students listen as much as possible to the BBC, watch English speaking movies, and so on.

Reading: obviously a piece of cake, not only that all answers are available, but they are physically there, black on white for one hour, a dream! As I said during the course, allow for one minute by question, and do not try the "true-false-not given" questions unless you feel excessively comfortable with the text(s). This gives you twenty minutes at the end of the exam to review the 34 easy questions and do what ever you can with the 6 'tricky' ones.

Writing: what to say, follow the instructions, that's it. Start with part two and then go for part one. For part two, stick to the 3-5-5-3 formula, it works, and read all the examples from the writefix web site. Sign post your position at the end of the introduction and flag up your conclusion. Remember, the more you write, the more you will make mistakes, just target 250-300 words in order to save some time to fix the spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes. For part one be only descriptive, unfortunately I got a new town plan, as an architect I was unable to limit myself. The description was for sure correct and exhaustive but I have for sure lost some precious minutes that could have been used more efficiently for checking.

Speaking: all speaking tests should take place on Friday morning at 10.00 am. I was fresh, my mind was free of any constraint, I just had a shower and a relax breakfeast. We talked about clothes and couscous.... Easy, just keep talking.

So, I needed band 6, I expected something like 7-7.5, I got 8.

Tony, thank you very much for your dedication and wise hints, and .....thank you again.

Best regards

Jean Luc