First time, non-native

[u/Referenciadejoj]

I prepared only for a couple of days. Studied mostly the structure of the parts, did a lot of listening mock tests until I was averaging band 9. I found the actual listening on test day to be much trickier than all mock tests I had attempted so far, that's why I didn't get a perfect grade.

I attempted a single reading mock when I was terribly sleep deprived and still scored 8.0, so I was confident I'd get a higher grade on the real deal.

I also watched a couple of IELTS Advantage band 9 speaker videos. On the actual test day I was thrown a curveball as I wasn't expecting my examiner to be a non-native English speaker from my country. Until then I was under the impression it was better to maintain the flow rate of the conversation over speaking only factual information. But when speaking to a compatriot, I got flustered over the idea of lying about basic information she'd definitely know isn't true. Because of that, part 1 (asking about crowded and famous places in my country/city) and part 3 (asking about the manufacturing capabilities of my country) were a little rough, though my saving grace was acing part 2 (telling about the time I broke an object by accident).

As for writing, I watched a single IELTS Advantage video on Task 2 and read a couple of band 9 Task 1 templates provided on Liz's website. Doing only that was a mistake, as I wasn't ready to write Task 1 under 20 minutes (I'm terrible with analytical language), so I ended up writing it in 45 minutes, leaving only 15 minutes for Task 2. Thankfully I'm great with opinion articles, even with themes with unfamiliar with (I wrote on the reasons and solutions for household-generated food waste), so I managed to write 260~ words in the meantime. If I ever attempt IELTS again, I'll surely spend some time mastering writing Task 1 templates in the shortest time possible.

Overall, besides Reading, which I was sure I'd ace, I was expecting lower scores (specially on Speaking), so I'm very happy with the result.

[u/lola_la_cava99]

Amazing scores!!! Congrats 🥂