IELTS Study Guide

Hi, I’m Elliott, the IELTS expert at Magoosh and today we’re going to talk about study schedules.

And we’re going to eventually look at an example of a study schedule that we’ve created here at Magoosh.

But to begin, we’re just going to talk a little bit about what study schedules are and how you can use them to improve your studying.

And to really boost your score on the exam by studying in the smartest and the best way possible.

So what is a study schedule?

Well, a study schedule is something to help you organize your time, okay?

You may have one month, or six months, or maybe just a week.

And the question a study schedule helps you answer is “how can organize my time the most efficiently?”

And “what’s gonna benefit the most in terms of increasing my score or helping me at least to do the best I can on the exam?” Okay?

So a study schedule gives you materials to study, to pace yourself over time in an appropriate way in order to make your studying the most efficient it can be.

Okay, another thing a study schedule does is, it prioritizes subject matter.

So some things are more important to study than others, depending on how much time you have.

For example of you have six months to study, that’s a long time to prepare.

And it might make sense for you to sign up for some classes.

And it might make sense for you to do a lot of self study with grammar, or writing, or other things that are generally going to improve your English skills.

If you only have a week to study before an exam, a big exam like the IELTS, that kind of studying is not going to benefit you as much.

You simply don’t have time in one week in order to really improve your grammar let’s say, right?

You don’t have time to spend a lot of time doing exercises and things like that.

And besides if you did that you would be ignoring important things like learning about the exam and what kinds of questions to expect.

And taking practice questions in learning about timing and other things that are important for the reading or the writing section for example.

So, a study schedule helps you to prioritize what is the most important thing to study in the amount of time you have before taking the test.

So, we have as an example of a study schedule.

At Magoosh, we’ve created a one month study schedule with these kinds of concepts in mind, okay?

We’re going to take a look at that, you can look at that schedule if you click on the link that’s in the description box below to see what the study schedule looks like.

Basically, it’s organized around a couple of things.

First of all, Magoosh lessons, lessons to help you learn about the kinds of things to expect on the exam.

Each section is covered with tips and strategies there to help you learn, how to succeed in each of these sections.

Also, of course, you need to take a lot of practice questions. And so there’s guidance there about what questions to answer, what kinds of questions to answer, and how many of them you should schedule for yourself on a particular day.

We also include information related to official practice questions, right? We also put ideas about what you could study, and what kinds of questions you could answer from official materials produced by IELTS itself.

So those links, those descriptions are there for you In order to supplement your study that you would do with Magoosh on this study schedule.

Also then of course there are additional things, things like reminding you to study vocabulary everyday, okay?

Or scheduling how frequently you want to take a full length practice test, right?

These timing, these elements of timing are a critical part of any study schedule, because you don’t want to study too little, right?

You wanna use your time the best you can and to sort of motivate yourself to study a little bit every day.

But also of course, if you studied for 10 to 12 hours a day, of course that would be too much.

The study schedule that we’ve created at Magoosh assumes that you can study for an hour to up to three hours every day, and that will depend on everybody, right?

Your situation will be unique for yourself.

Okay, so as you make your way through the study schedule, each week there’s six days of material there pushing you to study new things each day.

And also to review concepts and to review things that you’ve learned from you’re lessons from doing lot’s of practice questions, so that you can build a new knowledge and improve over time.

So, check out the study schedule and like this video if you found it helpful.

And if you have questions, go ahead and put them in the comments below.

And we’ll answer your questions about study schedules generally or the one that we’ve posted here.

So good luck with your studies!