The assessment she did not want
Farhana had finished her B.Sc. and had a deadline in her head: apply by October, start the following year. She came to the front desk in Narsingdi to register for an IELTS date and was asked, first, to sit the free placement assessment. Twenty-five minutes.
The result put her at roughly band 4.5. The counsellor told her plainly that booking a test in eight weeks would cost her the exam fee and give her a number she would not want on paper.
"I had already told my family I was giving IELTS. Sitting there and being told to wait — I was angry. I thought they just wanted to sell me a longer course."
She left without enrolling. Three weeks later she came back.
Foundation, and the tenses she thought she knew
Foundation English is three months of unglamorous work: tenses, articles, prepositions, sentence structure — taught for use rather than for memorising. Farhana's first written paragraph came back with more corrections than words.
What changed things, she says, was the vocabulary log. Every new word written down with the sentence it was found in, not with a Bangla translation. By the second month she was reading a graded reader on the bus.
- Month 1 — grammar rebuilt from the sentence up.
- Month 2 — reading habit established, vocabulary log started.
- Month 3 — first structured paragraphs, first full listening papers.
The second assessment
At the end of Foundation, students take the placement assessment again. Farhana came out around 5.5 — a full band higher than the day she was turned away, and comfortably inside the range where IELTS preparation makes sense.
"That was the day I understood what they had done for me. If I had given the exam in April I would have got 5.0 and paid for it twice."
IELTS Academic: learning what she was marked on
The first surprise in the full course was Writing. Not the grammar — the descriptors. Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, each worth a quarter.
Her early essays were being capped by Task Response: she was writing about a topic instead of answering a question. The fix was a single line written at the top of every answer sheet before starting — her position, in one sentence. Every paragraph then had something to serve.
Speaking was harder to shift. Part 2 answers kept ending at forty seconds. Recorded practice, played back to her, is what broke the habit — hearing the silence was worse than filling it.
Four mocks, and the one that went badly
The third mock was her worst: Reading 5.5. She had spent nineteen minutes on the first passage and abandoned the third. The review session did not soften it — the score sheet showed exactly where the minutes had gone.
The next four weeks were pacing drills. Twenty minutes per passage, timer on the desk, no exceptions. By the final mock her Reading was 7.0.
"The bad mock was the useful one. Everything I fixed after that came from that score sheet."
Test day, in a building she already knew
She sat the exam at the STS venue — the same building, the same stairs, the same staff at the desk. She has said since that this removed a whole layer of nerves she had not planned for.
Result: band 7.0. Listening 7.5, Reading 7.0, Writing 6.5, Speaking 7.0.
She applied to the University of Otago and is now studying in New Zealand. She still messages the IELTS desk on results days, usually to ask about someone else's score.
"They told me I was not ready. Six months later I understood it was the most useful thing anyone had said to me."