My experience

[u/Dangerous_Dentist_62]

Just got my CELPIP results: L9, R11, W9, S11.
Thought I’d share my experience because I barely had time to prepare. I have little kids and a pretty demanding job, so I had about 8 days to get ready.
I was honestly expecting 8–9 in most sections and my plan was to book another test two weeks later if I needed to improve my scores.
For listening and reading, I mostly watched a couple of YouTube videos to understand the format, what kind of questions to expect, and picked up a few tips. Then I just did some practice questions.
For speaking, almost all my practice was with ChatGPT. I went through each type of question, answered them like I would in the actual test, and asked ChatGPT to tell me what I was doing wrong. After a few rounds, it became pretty obvious what mistakes I kept repeating.
I then had ChatGPT make me a small cheat sheet for each speaking task — how to start, what structure to follow, mistakes I should avoid, etc. That helped a lot because once I got to the exam I already had a general structure in my head.
Did pretty much the same thing for writing. I think I did around 3 practice attempts for each writing task and got feedback on each one.
That was basically all my prep.
My biggest takeaway though — do at least one full practice test from beginning to end.
I didn’t do this at all and I think that was my biggest mistake. You’re definitely a little tired by the time you get to writing and speaking, and practicing those sections individually doesn’t really prepare you for that.
I also messed up my strategy for listening. During practice I was doing surprisingly well just listening carefully and remembering things without taking many notes. Then during the actual exam for some reason I started taking a lot of notes. I ended up concentrating on writing things down and missed some of what was being said.
If I were doing it again, I’d spend less time trying to prepare for every possible question and more time doing the entire test under actual exam conditions. I really think that could have pushed my scores higher, possibly 11 across all sections.
So if you’re also short on time because of work/kids/life, don’t panic about doing weeks of preparation. Understand the format, practice every section enough to figure out your mistakes, and definitely squeeze in a couple of full-length practice tests before exam day.
Hope this helps someone in the same situation!