IELTS was very hard

I recently took a computerised IELTS (Academic) test (except the speaking part), and it was far harder than I expected it to be. Serves me right to be overconfident—I did not think it would be necessary (or even possible) to study for it, which led to poor scores in half the tests.

Listening and Reading

These were very easy, I scored an 8.5 for both of these tests with little effort. I know I made at least one mistake in the listening test due to reading questions for the next section while the previous recording was still playing, completely missing what was said, but I don’t know where I made the mistake in the reading test.

The reason I found these tests very easy were because they were multiple-choice questions, with only some “open-ended” one or two word answers, making it difficult to mess up due to ambiguity.

Speaking

This one was hard. Very hard. I do not natively speak any variety of Standard English, which limits my maximum score to about an 8 at best due to nonstandard pronunciation, accent, and timing. I got a 7.5 for this one, which was very surprising, as I expected only 5 or 6 given how difficult I found it.

I found the questions very, very difficult. I cannot recall what all of them were, especially verbatim, but a few did stand out as being especially difficult. I was asked, firstly, whether people treated the elderly differently. I answered honestly: “I don’t know”.

The question is too vague; too complicated. Hands on my head. surprised and stressed, I couldn’t think of an answer, instead fumbling through my words trying to explain how I couldn’t understand the question and if I could have any data just so I could form some sort of guess. The examiner ignored me and continued asking: “Why do you think people treat the elderly differently?”

Huh? But… I just said that I didn’t know the answer…? Once again, I could not comprehend the question, so I answered again: “I don’t know”, still fumbling with my words wondering why these questions were so difficult and trying to explain to the examiner who was only interested in ignoring my confusion, relentlessly pressing on with the questions as if nothing I said mattered.

I did try and ask her to clarify, but she refused. There was another similar one: “Do people react differently when in the presence of a famous celebrity?” Again, I didn’t know the answer—it was complicated. It was difficult to define “famous celebrity”, it was difficult to generalise “people” as everybody has different reactions, some of them indifferent, and not everyone knows all the famous celebrities, in addition to the fact that even those who do know may not recognise them on the streets.

I asked the examiner if she could clarify. She ignored my question. “Does the person we have in mind know that this is a famous celebrity?” “Does our person recognise the celebrity?” “How famous is this celebrity?”. Again, no answer. I felt like I was conversing with a brick wall. It went on like this for a while, the questions I couldn’t answer, my struggling to find the answers in spite of a complete lack of data in the midst of unprecedented ambiguity until eventually, time was up, stopping me mid-sentence as I began a reply with yet another “I don’t know”.

The entire transcript could have been summarised by just those three words: it’s why I was so surprised when I scored a 7.5 in spite of all that, when all I did was say I didn’t know.

Writing

We’re seeing a pattern here, aren’t we? With a 7.0, I’m definitely seeing a pattern: I’m horrible with open-ended questions. A recent study suggests that people look more attractive with masks than without, which led some people to quip: “you’re a lot better-looking when I can’t see your face”, perhaps the same applies to my English: “it’s a lot better when I shut up”.

The first was a task to summarise some data from a table, of which no source, sample size, or any other information was provided. I remember proclaiming near the end that this was proof that God exists, obviously sarcastically, under the premise that it had to have been God who gave us this data.

It was a 150-word task, I spent over 600 words complaining about the illogical nature of the task, wondering how redundant and superfluous it would be for me to spell out literally everything in the table as it would more more insane for the table to not be attached to whatever article I’m supposedly writing. I did try to spell out the main differences, or anything I found interesting, again ignoring margin of error, sample size and whatnot under the premise that the data was given to us by an omniscient being aka God and hence infallibly accurate.

I don’t think the examiners appreciated whatever I wrote, but I don’t know what else they wanted me to do with that uncited data. It wasn’t very interesting data to begin with, just something about retirement ages and countries; useless trivia without any further analysis. If they had cited some sources, attached a companion article, talked about the study’s methodology, etc., I could have actually written something useful, but instead I found proof of God.

The next part was a 250-word task, which I spent 1000 words also complaining about how the question was illogical by nature and couldn’t be answered: I wrote something along the lines of how I could neither agree nor disagree because the question is a non-sequitur. In hindsight, it sounds immature, a bit rebellious, maybe, but I was really frustrated after the previous 600 words (along with the speaking test from earlier) and had little patience left.

It was largely incoherent rambling, I expect to have failed every scoring rubric for that drivel and thus only scoring a 4 or 5, but I got a 7, which, like the speaking test, really surprised me. I don’t know why they like asking me impossible questions. How am I supposed to answer any of these questions without data? Why all the questions always loaded in some form or another? Why is everything so ambiguous and subjective, yet stated with such confidence and certainty? I don’t know what “people think”—that’s far too vague. I don’t even know whether P causes Q—I’m not God—so how should I know to what extent P affects Q? Or whether P leads to S given how much it affects Q, even though we know nothing about the extent that P affects Q, or whether it even does at all.

It’s like asking me what the traffic will be like today: “I don’t know.“
It’s like asking me whether video games should be banned because they cause violence: “I don’t know.“

In order to argue about whether the fact they cause violence is enough justification for their ban, we first have to know that they cause violence to begin with. The answer to that? I don’t know. The question is illogical—it jumps ahead of itself, creating a disjointed logical sequence, which I spent 1000 words complaining about.

Of course, the question was nowhere near as simple as my example (the answer is no, by the way, there’s no meaningful correlation), at least for me, as I assume the owners of said establishments in question would have been able to easily answer the test question due to their prior knowledge, thus making the difficulty non-universal. Why couldn’t they ask easier questions? Something less vague? Something less messy?

Something more straightforward like asking us to summarise a short study with the abstract, discussion, and conclusion sections removed would be so much easier, or perhaps to elaborate on a short philosophical concept instead of asking questions impossible to answer given the limitations of exam conditions with the lack of access to data and sources. Impossible for anyone, short of God himself, who was proven to exist in the first part of the test.

Closing

Anyone who’s written a first draft would have thrown it away by now. I think the same goes for exam submissions, but that’s what we’re graded on for whatever reason (imagine a world where authors were only allowed to publish their first drafts: the horror!). On that note, this is actually a third draft (it was initially a first, but I’ve run through it a couple times since and trust me, you do not want to know how much I had to fix), but it could still be riddled with typos, missing words, unnecessary repetitions, or who knows what. That said, if you’ve made it this far, you probably understand what it’s like to read and write drafts. You may also have not done that and skipped to the closing, which is understandable: even the examiners didn’t like what I wrote, and they were literally paid to.

Actually, despite what I made it seem like, I did enjoy the writing test. Ever since I switched to a 75% keyboard I have been unable to use my precious ALT0151 em dash, always relying on pasting it from elsewhere due to the lack of a numpad. Like meeting an old friend in a long time, I felt disproportionately happy with being reuinted—even if only temporarily—with my long-lost numpad friend.

To summarise my scores:

• Speaking: 7.5
• Listening: 8.5
• Reading: 8.5
• Writing: 7

With a 7 in writing I wonder what this means for everything I’ve written so far: if this is what someone with a band 7 in writing writes, then… that’s a hell of a lot of room for improvement, isn’t it? Just imagine what someone with an 8 or 9 could write—the quality of this website’s content would skyrocket into space.

Anyway, back to the topic, given that the questions were largely incomprehensible, unreasonable, or outright unfair; I don’t think any amount of studying would have helped me with the impossible speaking and writing questions. The experience could not have been more traumatic, which is, in itself, insane, given that it isn’t supposed to be traumatic at all. I’ve been speaking a variety of English ever since I was born (which is several decades now), and I still found it obscenely difficult. I shudder to think how native speakers of non-English-variety languages would feel when encountering such difficult questions when even I struggled this much.