So the story is next: I was applying for a PhD program, when 5 days prior to the deadline I found out that the admission office requires an EL certificate with C1 level 😂 So my first advice: read the requirements carefully ahah
I thought 5 days would be enough, also I had no clue what it is about, it seemed like an easy deal so far.
So I took this Ready Member preparation course. First I laughed that each small course for each part of the test is estimated at least 5.5 hours long. Moving forward, I thought I needed to pass a mock test, and with FlexiCheck I received band 6.0 lol. At this moment I knew I fucked up… (c)
In parallel I had to work in a hospital with half of my colleagues on vacation, and my application also required attention.
When listening and speaking were maybe one of the easiest parts for me (as I deliberately thought), I decided that I should take writing and reading as primary priorities. The writing course at Ready Premium is nice, however paying for each AI feedback and honestly very doubtful one, wasn’t a great choice. So I found these IELTS Academic Writing Sample Tasks (https://ielts.org/cdn/Sample-tests/ielts-academic-writing-sample-tasks-2023.pdf) and fed them to Claude alongside my mock test results and some screenshots from the course.
Notably, my mock test writing was 5 at the beginning.But it really trained the basic difference between essay types, structure, words and so on. Within one weekend (5 hours/day) and 3 working days (2–3 hours) I managed to reach 6.5 writing according to Claude and 6.5–7.0 according to FlexiCheck, wt1 was on average 0.5 higher than wt2.
What I really liked is that Claude, whether parsed from the internet or created by itself, provided pretty well-structured tasks, with feedback on your writing you wouldn’t expect at FlexiCheck. I used Opus 4.7.
On the test date I had serious bugs with Inspera as its modules are conflicting with virtual Zoom audio devices on macOS. So I needed to uninstall, reboot and try a second time. If some of you are interested, there is also a small algorithm above on how to avoid it.
Because of this, I was stressed out as f, so I think this also affected the way I performed. I feel it could be even better, especially with listening. However, I want to recommend combining Claude with Ready Premium as a way to follow if you need to pass this test urgently and you know literally nothing about the test structure beforehand. Good luck y’all
P.S.
About me: 30 yo, physician, non-native, previous experience in medical literature translation and lots of reading papers and related speaking through the last 8 years