Here is what our friend from Vietnam remembers about his academic IELTS exam (thanks, H - we hope you get a great score!).

Listening test

The quality of sound was good, all voices were clear, so I did as well as when I had practiced at home. I missed two regrettable questions because one time in part 2 I moved to next question right after answering a former one while the talk moved gradually, another time was in part 3, when I was considering the answer for one question people in the dialogue moved to the content for next question. Fortunately, the forms of questions in part 4 (the most difficult part) were multiple choice (only 2 questions) and filling in the blanks in a table and outlines. These forms were easier than filling in the blanks of a paragraph.

Reading test

Section 1 was about general information of a new water solution project in a certain area. I was very easy to understand and its’ questions were easy, too.

Unfortunately, the second section was the most difficult one, it took me 25 minutes and I was still not happy with my answers. Its content was about two ways of planets’ formation.

Section 3 was easier than Section 2, so if I had chance to do the test again I would do section 3 before Section 2.

Writing test

Writing task 1 (report)
The task was to describe a bar chart comparing the world average literacy rate with selected regions in men and women separately.

Writing task 2 (essay)
The task was to discuss and give opinions about the idea that “people will buy products as long as they are good, and advertising should be a form of entertainment”.

Speaking test

Interview
The examiner asked me about 12 written questions separated in 3 topics: my work, art and museum, and gardening.
I did not have so many words in my vocabulary to talk about the 2 former topics so I responded generally. I went through this part relatively fast.

Cue card
Talk about a famous tourism place in Vietnam. You should say:
-What’s it name
-Where it is
-What does it have, what can you see and do there?
And you need to talk about why do you like the place.

This part is quite a bit of trouble for me, because I had not practiced much this kind of test. I went through this part in 1 minute 30 seconds, finishing because of lack of words to describe an event.

Then, examiner asked me one extended question before moving to Part 3. That was a simple and short question: “Do you wish to visit that place again?”

Discussion
The examiner read 4 more written questions from the exam material asking me about related issues of the topic in Part 2(Cue card). A surprise for me, the questions was not based on what I talked, but they had been written in the exam material.

The questions were:
- What advantages do you think tourism brings to Vietnam?
- When the government promotes tourism, what do you think negatively affects the society?
- How do you think the development of tourism changes Vietnamese culture?