The PASS English Exam Blog

        Is the computer-based format better for IELTS and Cambridge exams?   All teachers who have worked in the field of English exam preparation know this scenario. Your student comes back from their exam looking a bit glum and you ask them what went wrong. They complain that they couldn’t concentrate because people were coughing and sneezing or there was building work going on outside. Moreover, typically, they say the sound system at the venue was poor quality and they couldn’t hear the audio recordings properly. Furthermore, the tables weren’t close enough together so it was almost impossible to cheat. Well, ok, I made up that last one! When students complain about exam conditions I usually reassure them that it probably won’t have had a big effect on their overall performance, and maybe I privately think they are getting their excuses in early. However, at the back of my mind I do feel a lot of sympathy as regards the quality of the audio. It really c...

How many papers are there in the Cambridge B2 First and C1 Advanced exams? Do you know what each paper is worth in terms of your overall score? Of course, there are four papers. Three of them are worth 20% each and one of them is worth 40%. How strange! If I had asked the same questions prior to 2015 the answers would have been different. Then there were five papers all worth 20%. So what happened? Well, in 2015 Cambridge decided to merge two of the papers, Reading and Use of English. So now this one paper is worth nearly half the marks. So, it must be really long, right? Actually no it isn’t, relatively speaking. In the B2 First it takes 75 minutes and in the C1 Advanced it takes 90 minutes. The Writing paper in the B2 First is longer, and in the C1 Advanced it’s the same length. But it’s only worth half as many marks. In total, the B2 First exam last about three and a half hours, and the C1 Advanced lasts about four hours. So these papers take up just over a third of the exam and rep...

Easter is hard upon us and the Bunny is on its way bringing eggs to well-behaved children. Well, I have 3 things I’d like to ask the Bunny to bring to students who are preparing English exams such as Cambridge B2 First, C1 Advanced or IELTS. But they aren’t eggs. Today I attended a Macmillan Education webinar entitled, “7 tips for setting up an exam preparation course”. The speaker was Ethan Mansur, writer of the Teacher’s Book of the 4 th edition of Macmillan’s long-running “Ready for” series. I have always felt this series provides great support to teachers who are preparing their students for B2 First and C1 Advanced. In his talk, Ethan made some interesting points that I’d like to pick up on. Firstly, he stressed the importance of doing a needs analysis at the start of a course. So far so good but what I really liked were the 3 main areas of the needs analysis: strengths and weaknesses; motivations; learning preferences . This student-centred approach allows educators and teacher...