Just received my IELTS results yesterday!

I was quite nervous when I entered the British Council Kuala Lumpur building to collect my results… But well, I didn’t do as bad as I’d thought! Received an overall band score of 8.5 out of 9, with 8.5 for each of the Writing, Listening and Speaking modules, and 9.0 for Reading.

In fact, it’s not bad at all! This score satisfies the conditional offers of all the eight universities that I’m choosing from! Yay! Now my admission is guaranteed!

I didn’t really have time to blog about the IELTS test day as I was quite busy and also worried in the two weeks after the test. Worried because I believed that I’d screwed up the Writing and Reading papers… especially writing!

The time given for the writing test was one hour, with two questions. We were supposed to spend 20 minutes on writing a report on some chart given to us, and spend the remaining 40 minutes writing a much longer argumentative essay on a selection of topics.

I spent 45 MINUTES on the report (I’d always got this fatal habit of checking and rechecking every sentence I write) and spent the remaining 15 minutes zooming through the second essay. I guess five years of essay writing in university and on this blog helped LOL.

I remember being quite satisfied with the 15-minute express-essay, but as I wrote the words “In conclusion,” at the beginning of the last paragraph, the invigilator horrifyingly announced: ‘stop writing please!’

I hesitated and simply rubbed of the two words… handing up an essay with NO CONCLUSION! 

Well, as for reading, I didn’t have time to do the last 4 multiple-choice questions (out of 50), so I simply circled ‘C’ for the remaining questions and laid down my pen. None of us dared to continue writing beyond the time given after witnessing an earlier incident in which a girl had refused to stop writing and the invigilator marched straight up to her desk and literally snatched the answer sheet away from her!

The girl ended up crying at her desk after the incident.

So I really didn’t expect my reading paper to get a perfect 9.0. If I was told that one of my papers got a 9.0, I would’ve expected it to be the listening paper – which I believed I got every answer correct – but it turns out I didn’t.

The speaking test was an absolute joy to attend. We (the candidates) took turns entering these small rooms which felt remarkably like confessional booths in cathedrals! The only difference between confessional booths and our rooms was that we could see the examiner, in my case a cheerful British lady with a most encouraging smile.

The only scary part about the speaking test was the recording. The examiner would start recording at the very beginning by declaring a solemn statement to the recorder, something like “This is the speaking test of Mr. James K. H. Chow, on the seventh day of May, the question set is 4B and the examiner is XXX.” It sounded like an interrogation and was initially quite scary!

However as she started asking questions it wasn’t so bad after all. In the beginning I was asked to talk about the city in which I lived, whether I liked it, which place I liked best, blah blah blah. She would keep inserting questions to keep me talking.

In the second part she asked me which newspapers I read. That was an easy question so I gladly responded by giving free publicity to The Star, The Edge and the online news portals of BBC and CNN. She asked me what influenced my choice of newspapers and the type of news that I liked to read about. She was so friendly and engaging that I felt like I was taking to a friend! I couldn’t really stop talking and I recall there was one point when I started talking about politics. LOL. Perhaps I shouldn’t have… but she didn’t stop me and kept smiling and nodding patiently…

I think she should change her job and be a psychiatrist instead. 

Anyway for the last part of the test, I was asked to describe, in two minutes, a recent news item that I had just read about. I was given one minute to prepare for this ‘mini-speech’.

I could have talked about Osama Bin Laden’s death or a recent development in Anwar’s sodomy case… But since I was talking to a British lady, I decided to talk about the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton which had happened just a week ago. She seemed exceptionally interested in what I had to say. Luckily I’d watched the entire ceremony live on the internet and the memory was still fresh in mind!

I think the third part may be a little difficult for certain people as the topic given can (potentially) startle you and render your mind blank for the entire one minute that you’re given to prepare the talk. Well for this part I think I should thank my involvement in Toastmasters – guess the Table Topics sessions really helped a lot!

All in all I think my IELTS journey was quite a smooth one. I didn’t really prepare too much for the tests as they coincide with my final project presentation in my university (just days apart). But who cares! Now it’s over and I’ll need to focus on my FYP and final exams!