IELTS Examiners worldwide are supported by the IELTS Professional Support Network; a system of recruitment, training, standardisation and monitoring of examiners. The Professional Support Network is jointly managed by the British Council and IDP: IELTS Australia. As IELTS partners, British Council and IDP: IELTS Australia also shares examiners in many centres and locations and our standardised Professional Support Network helps us to penetrate this practice across various locations.

Writing assessments are carried out by trained and certified IELTS examiners. The examiners work to clearly defined criteria and are subject to extensive and detailed quality control procedures, including regular monitoring on their marking to ensure IELTS is fair to all. To achieve this, IELTS has different levels of data protection; i.e. ensuring examiners don’t have access to the purpose of why you are taking the test, your level of education, your personal details, band scores of the other test components and your previous IELTS results if you have taken the test before.

All IELTS examiners undergo the same examiner training which is carried out by an examiner trainer. The training helps them to apply the assessment criteria accurately and reliably to ensure consistency of its application by examiners across all IELTS centres managed by the British Council and IDP: IELTS Australia.

IELTS strictly follows a distributed marking policy. This practice ensures that:

• Your IELTS writing and speaking are marked by different examiners.
• Your IELTS writing task 1 and writing task 2 are marked by two different examiners.
• Your IELTS Listening and Reading are marked by certified markers, who don’t get involved in either writing or speaking assessment.

 The above mandatory practice ensures that your performance is assessed by at least 4 different examiners and markers who do not have access to your scores on other sections, as part of the distributed marking rule. 

IELTS examiners are trained to assess your performance on a particular test day by following the set criteria. IELTS maintains highest level of security in data protection and due to this and as part of our commitment to be fair to all our test takers, IELTS centres are not allowed to either discuss or share your previous IELTS scores with examiners who are assigned to mark your current test performance. IELTS Professional Support Network system also ensures that the marking is up to standard and it accurately reflects your performance on a particular test day.

IELTS test users including educational institutes, professional bodies, immigration authorities and many others set their own minimum score requirements. This is why the minimum score requirement varies across different test users. IELTS helps them in undertaking this exercise by making a range of publications available for their reference. Test users arrive at an appropriate score standard for their use by evaluating various aspects, such as understanding a) IELTS scores, b) marking criteria, c) demands placed on language ability in their working context and through their experience of students entering a course of study/training, or of employees entering a working environment or of migrants entering a new country.

Learning a language is a life changing experience. Like developing any other skill, English language enhancement requires a continuous effort that should be put in practice. That will only make you better and help you improve your test.

IELTS examiners follow set criteria and are trained to assess your speaking skills on four indicators; lexical resource, grammar, fluency and pronunciation. Any opinions or views shared by you don’t form part of the speaking marking criteria.

IELTS enjoys a unique partnership of 3 international organisations; The British Council, IDP: IELTS Australia and Cambridge English Language Assessment. Whilst British Council and IDP: IELTS Australia manage the test delivery, examiner management, result processing, compliance and other centre related aspects, Cambridge Assessment is involved in research, test development and paper despatch to all IELTS centres. Since the paper production and despatch are controlled by one IELTS partner, the standard of the test is the same regardless of the location you choose to sit for your test. It also brings consistency in the approach we undertake in assessing you on your language skill.

It’s crucial to achieve better scores in each IELTS sections (listening, reading, writing and speaking) to get a good overall score. One of the best practices is to put in more time in improving your weaker skills that could lead to a higher overall score.