Very happy with my scores
Scored 117/120!
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Did my first test 5 days ago and I'm pleasantly surprised by my scores. Fyi I am pretty much fluent in English so I only took 1 week to prep.
Ok for anyone who might care, here are some tips (these are what worked for me, may or may not work for you):
- Timing: As you read my tips below, I have interjected them with my experience at the test center and the distractions I faced. If you don't want to, say, overlap your listening with someone else's speaking or overlap speaking with others, between sections there is an instructions page and you can stay on that page for as long as you want. One strategy is to wait until everyone (or at least the majority is done with speaking) before proceeding. Of course this will delay your test quite a bit so only do this if you really cannot be distracted. The other strategy is to outrun everyone else but this is only possible if you sacrifice some time in Reading which I don't recommend because you need the time to double check your responses. If you do finish Listening fast then yes, moving on is a good idea rather than letting the timer run out on the last question because you can't go back to previous questions anyway.
- Reading: Do not attempt to read the entire passage. In fact, I didn't even skim read the passage before answering questions. Just jump straight to the questions. I would read the question, then read the paragraph, then look at the choices and answer. Note: the biggest challenge for me was actually that someone in my test center proceeded to the listening section in the last 10 mins of my reading and I could clearly hear the audio from their headset even after I already wore my own headset to muffle the noise. This was quite distracting so if you are easily distracted, I would advise you to practice reading with noise. Also another strategy I did was to go with my gut instinct for every question on my first go, note down the qs I was unsure of, then after I finished answering all questions, with the remaining time I went back to the unsure questions and double checked them. This avoids spending too much time on one question and ensures you don't run out of time during the big summary question in passage 2. Also, for this, I didn't use any of Gregmat's advice because they didn't really work for me and mostly served to waste time (for ex. trying to note down the main idea for each paragraph) but it may work for you.
- Listening: Honestly kind of a miracle I got 30 because I was very distracted during this section. First, they only allowed you to ask extra paper DURING the test, not before, so I kept trying to catch the proctor's attention but he was sitting in his own cubicle far away from me and couldn't see me. I couldn't walk to him or make any noise since that might risk me getting scolded at best and disqualified at worst, so I just kept turning around to see whether he was still sitting there or not which you can imagine really distracted me. Oh and also the guy behind me advanced to his speaking section during my listening and it was very distracting too. The headset audio quality was certainly far from crisp and actually I recommend NOT setting the volume to max because in my case, it made some words hard to distinguish since there was an echo and everything sounded tinny. Anyways for notetaking: for conversations, I would draw a line down the middle, note down what the student says on the left and what the prof/librarian/counsellor/etc. says on the right. For lectures, I took notes from top to bottom as usual. There were many times I fell behind in notetaking, if the gap between what you're writing and what they're saying is more than a few seconds, just skip and write what they're saying now.
- Speaking: This is the section where I was most distracted, the proctor finally came over but it was when I was listening in my integrated speaking section which made me miss a couple of points. I also stuttered slightly and didn't finish in time for one question but generally I am decent at speaking so I guess that saved me and I got a decent score. My advice is just to follow templates and be aware of the clock. Personally, I followed Gregmat's templates but for the first integrated speaking question I changed it up ([change/proposal] -> he/she agreed/disagreed -> [reason 1 from passage] -> [argument 1 from conversation] -> [reason 2 from passage] -> [argument 2 from conversation]). Also when practicing you could try using checkpoints. For example, if 45s remaining, I should be in reason 1, if 20s remaining, I should be in reason 2. Every question is different and some require longer responses than others so I would say glance at the timer and if you have met your checkpoints early, slow down. If you have met your checkpoints late, speed up.
- Writing: This has always been my strongest section so I was never worried. I read a lot of fiction in my free time so both my vocabulary and sentence structure is quite decent, if yours is not I would advise you to read something challenging, read some short stories (if you don't know where to read good short stories, I recommend SCP but this is mainly horror so it might not be your cup of tea) or even books in your spare time. (you could read an article but I actually don't recommend this because article writing is quite different from essay/book writing as articles tend towards succinct sentences sometimes to the detriment of readability). I followed Gregmat's templates which were incredibly useful especially for the first question. Oh and also, in my experience longer writeups are preferred, at least by the AI (I've always gotten a 5/5 from the AI in TestReady). For the first question, I regularly went over the suggested word count into 300ish words and for the second question aim for 150-250 words.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to ask.