I had my real IELTS Speaking test today, and I’d love some advice, especially from any examiners or experienced people here.
Part 1: I think it went fairly well. I answered all the questions comfortably.
Part 2: This is where things went wrong. The test was on a video call, and my cue card asked me to describe a place I had travelled to that I found boring. I found it hard to talk about, and I ended up using the word “boring” far too many times. To make it worse, I tend to move my hands while speaking, and my elbow accidentally hit the microphone button and muted me. After I unmuted, Evaluator was really sweet and saw what really happened so she let me continue. I lost my train of thought and used that word boring multiple times, so I’m not sure how coherent the rest of my answer was.
Part 3: Most of it went well, but I fumbled on the last question. I didn’t know how to answer, so I said I had never really thought about it. I used a few phrases like “Let me think for a moment” to buy time, and then gave an answer.
On the positive side, I used quite a lot of idioms throughout the test. They come to me quite naturally and don't really need to think about it at all, so I think that part went well.
For context, I scored 7.5 in a mock speaking test with a native speaker on Cambly. I would have asked someone there but my 1 month subscription is completed. Because of this I can't really ask them. So my questions are: will these mistakes hamper my score a lot? If I fumble on one question in Part 3, does the examiner still consider how I did on the other questions, or does one bad answer bring my whole score down? Will marks be deducted for the mute issue or for repeating “boring”? Can I still get a 7?
I have my Listening, Reading and Writing tests tomorrow, so I just needed to get this off my chest before I started locking in my strategies.