I only had a few weeks to prepare, so I took a couple of listening and reading practice tests from Cambridge English straight away to gauge myself. I was consistently scoring above 35, so didn’t spend much time to prepare for these sections but did few more practice tests to get familiar with all question types. IELTSliz youtube videos and blog posts helped in understanding some nuances.
As I stated in another thread, I kept my formula for writing simple. In the first paragraph, I always start by paraphrasing the question and summarizing what I will be writing or which side I’m taking. Then, I will write two of my best ideas in two paragraphs. Finally, conclude by summarizing again. I placed more emphasis not to have any spelling or grammatical errors, right punctuation, and best connecting words.
For speaking, I referred again to the latest questions sections on IELTSLiz blog. I didn’t prepare the complete answers, but just prepared the gist of most common questions such as my favorite hobby, vacation. Personally, I felt I could have done the speaking test much better but the exam pressure got to me and kept repeating/correcting myself during the test.
PS: I always plan to complete the reading practice tests in 40 minutes, and it came handy during the test. I used the remaining time to review the answers and in fact, corrected three answers in the exam which gave me a perfect 9.
