Getting ready for an exam

Studying for an exam is very stressful. Honestly, the key to doing well, especially at a high level (such as the C1 Advanced or 7+ in IELTS) is having enough time to develop your English skills to get the scores you need. It takes a lot of dedication to learn a language, but you can absolutely do it.

I never recommend doing an exam before you are ready to do it. In fact, it's really important that you consistantly can perform slightly better than you need for your exam, since the stress will probably power your score. Therefore, it is important to have your skills evaluated before booking your test to see if you're ready or not, and to know how best to improve. 

You cannot improve your weaknesses if you are unaware of them, so empower yourself by getting feedback to know exactly what you need to work on in order to improve!

Before doing any test, I recommend doing the following to prepare:

1. Familiarize yourself with the different parts of your exam and what you must do to get a high score in each part. 

2. Have your skills evaluated. Depending on your weaknesses, you'll adapt your study strategies.

• If your language skills are not at the right level, this may mean you'll need to delay your test to give yourself time to improve

• You may have a lot of skills you need to improve before doing your exam. Focus only on improving only 2 or 3 weaknesses at a time. This is more effective than focusing on too many things at once. Also, focus on improving basic accuracy first. 

• If you only have one or two things to improve on, you should focus mostly on improving those things.

• Your resources for preparing for an exam are limited, so don't waste them. If you need to improve your general over-all level of English first, focus on doing that with other material before studying for the exam using exam preparation material. There are some great books such as Cambridge's Open World which will help you develop skills needed for the B2 First and C1 Advanced exam without actually using exam material. There are also lots of other things you can do to build your overall level of English.