In this blog Joseph, IH Manchester Academic Manager, will help you to think about how to manage your time during your IELTS exam.
Managing your time is very important in the exam. There is not much time you have, only one hour for two pieces of writing and only one hour for three pieces of reading. It’s not a lot of time. However to begin with you might want to think about not thinking about timing! sO practice without any time limits until you’re comfortable with the task. Why put extra pressure on yourself until you know that you can actually do the task?
So start off practicing the tasks, looking at the different task types without worrying about any time limits. Then once you feel that you are comfortable with the task, and you can do it, then you can start putting time limits on and practice doing the same task in a shorter time ready for the exam.
You need to split the timings into manageable times. So rather than just thinking ‘I have an hour for my writing’ you need to split that into the different parts. You have two parts, one is worth more than the other, so part one we would suggest that you spend 20 minutes. And for part two 40 minutes, but within that 40 minutes again split it up further:
*10 minutes to plan your answer.
*25 minutes actually writing your answer.
*5 mins to check. Make sure you think about giving yourself time at the end about 5 minutes usually to check your answer and go through looking for grammar mistakes.
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