Worst for IELTS Exam; Totally Unorganized. Review on British Council IELTS

GO for IDP ONLY. Don’t even think about BC.

I recently appeared i.e. on 9 September for IELTS by British council and had shocking bad experience in comparison to IDP which I gave sometime back. Here are few reasons:

1. Watches not allowed and they will make sure you don't get to see either:

Only if God had given them a little brain to understand the importance of watch during the exam. While IDP shows ‘time left’(for instance watch shows 30 min left) by stop watch to everyone Bristish council show time on screen by using projector on one side of the long hall and the problem is no matter how many times you ask them, whenever you want to see time, someone is standing between the screen and projector and all you can see is a shadow instead of time.

Now what can you do? You would raise hand during the exam but they won't see, then one of the candidate would complain about not being able to see time. They will take a minute to walk to that person & ask person to move so that students can see time but in few minutes same story will repeat.

Many candidate complained of missing writing due to this, some thought they took paper early but what can they do when they start paper at 1:54 pm instead of scheduled time of 1:00 pm.

1. Total Mismanagement with zero common sense:

10 people doing registration and taking ages and with only one queue going into exam hall. Now you imagine a very long that queue taking hours just to get in.

Everyone in British council team made sure that they neither use common sense and nor let anyone else use it. Macy exam takers requested them to start atleast 3 queue but only if they could get that.

Also, can you believe there is a very long queue yet few people inside the hall were assigned to show you your seat? What the hell? If you just tell the row number and hand over the seat number then it's good enough as the number and name slip were on each desk.

1. They are late by ages:

Imagine many candidates without mobile and wallets(not allowed) must have told their parents they will come by a certain time. Now, you came 1.5 hours early(registration time) yet it took 2.5 hours just to get into the examination room. Obviously, you will be late by at least an hour and you don’t even have a phone to tell your family to not worry.

1. Faulty wiring:

They seem to not check the wiring before hand as in the listening test many headphone devices were not working and hence they were moving candidate here and there.

1. Books provided by BC:

The book I received had a very light print making it little difficult to read. The major concern was that it was full of mistakes & incorrect answers and no ‘Errata Notice’ in it. They could have shared same in email if not hard copy.

I was lucky to get it from a friend who is in different country and luckily he got one which he shared with me over email. So yes same books are used for some time in each country.

6–12. I can go on and on about their blunders(Yes, there are many more) but I hope you got the idea and I shall not waste anymore of my time on this.