Test-day playbook · defending your floor

The band you walk out with is the floor of what you’ve been scoring in practice over the last fortnight — never the ceiling. Test-day teaching is not about effort; it’s about not bleeding the half-band you already earned. This is the tactical playbook I run with every student in the final session before their sitting.

The 48-hour rule

Stop learning new material 48 hours before the test. Cramming a new Task 2 template or a fresh linking-phrase list the night before adds anxiety and nothing else — research on cognitive load is unambiguous here. Spend the time on re-exposure instead: skim a framework you already know, re-read a mock you already finished. Familiarity, not novelty.

Know your caps

Before walking in, write down — on paper — the two numbers that matter. Anchoring on those numbers stops the test-day upside fantasy from tanking your pacing.

Worst-skill floor

If Writing has been averaging 6.0 in practice, the test-day Writing band won’t be 7.0. Plan around that — it tells you where to spend the most time re-reading.

Overall band line

The average across your last three honest mocks. This is what you’re defending, not chasing.

Section-by-section playbook

Listening

Read ahead during the pauses

Skim the next question set while the narrator is still reading instructions you already know. The 30 seconds IELTS gives you are worth 0.5 marks on average.

Pencil, don’t commit

Section 3 distractors live on self-correction. Mark the first answer lightly, wait for the reversal, then finalise.

If you miss a question, move

Do not try to reconstruct. The next question is playing while you stall — you’ll lose two marks chasing one.

Reading

20 minutes per passage, hard cap

Set an internal clock. If you’re behind at 20, commit your best guess on the hardest remaining question and move on. A guess gives you a 25–33% chance of being right; a blank is a guaranteed 0.

True / False / Not Given is where students leak marks

“Not Given” means the passage simply doesn’t say — not “I feel it’s not true.” If you’re inferring, you’ve probably misread.

Transfer answers as you go

Reading has no dedicated transfer time. Students who batch the transfer at the end run out of clock.

Writing

Plan for 3 minutes on Task 2

Four bullet points — position, body 1 main idea, body 2 main idea, conclusion angle. Skipping this plan is the single biggest preventable loss on Coherence & Cohesion.

Do Task 2 first

It’s worth double the marks and takes more cognitive load. Tired Task 1 at the end costs less.

Floor is 270 words, not 250

Give yourself margin — 250 exactly is a rounding risk for the examiner.

Speaking

Warm your mouth for 10 minutes

Read anything English aloud — a headline, a podcast transcript. Cold first answers tend to be hesitant, which weakens Fluency & Coherence on the opening minutes the examiner is calibrating against.

Do not memorise Part 2 answers

Examiners clock rehearsed structure inside the first 20 seconds and flag it — you lose Lexical Resource marks for “rehearsed” speech.

Buy time with discourse markers, not filler

“That’s a good question — let me think” is fluent English. “Uhhh…” is not.

The between-section reset (60 seconds)

Don’t replay the last section

You cannot change it. Rumination costs you marks on the next one.

Unclench your jaw and shoulders

Physical tension directly tanks Listening accuracy — the ear narrows.

Re-anchor — what am I listening / reading for?

Re-read the question stem before the audio resumes. The first 5 seconds of every section are when most marks are won or lost.

After the test

Do not post-mortem with forums. Every “was the answer X or Y?” thread ever posted was wrong about one of them. If you’re re-sitting, note one tactical change — the memory is fresh now and worthless in a week.