IELTS coaching built around the band you actually need
IELTS is marked by human examiners against published band descriptors, which makes it a very different preparation problem to PTE. Nothing is scored by an algorithm you can reverse-engineer. What moves your band is understanding what an examiner is instructed to look for in each criterion, then writing and speaking to that. Score Smart’s IELTS coaching runs as 12 one-to-one sessions ($500) covering all four modules.
Why one-to-one rather than a group
Writing and Speaking are where bands are won and lost, and both are judged on individual habits. A group class can teach you the Task 2 essay structure; it cannot sit with your particular tendency to over-generalise in the second body paragraph, or the filler phrases you reach for when a Part 3 question surprises you.
Twelve sessions is enough to cover all four modules properly and still spend the majority of the time on your two weakest. Booking is flexible, which suits students already working or studying.
The four criteria that decide your Writing band
Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy are weighted equally. Most students who stall at 6.5 are strong on two and weak on two, and do not know which.
Task Achievement is the one candidates lose most often without noticing — answering a slightly different question to the one asked, or failing to cover both parts of a two-part prompt. It is also the fastest to fix once identified.
Lexical Resource does not reward long words. It rewards precise and varied ones used naturally. Memorised “band 9 vocabulary” lists tend to read as exactly that to an examiner.
Speaking: three parts, three different skills
Part 1 is short factual answers, Part 2 is a two-minute solo turn from a cue card, and Part 3 is an abstract discussion. Students who prepare only for Part 2 are preparing for a third of the test.
Fluency and coherence are assessed on whether you can keep going and stay on topic — not on speed. Long pauses hurt; speaking quickly to fill silence hurts too, because pronunciation and grammar accuracy suffer.
Sessions include recorded practice so you hear your own hesitation patterns rather than being told about them.
Reading and Listening are time-management problems
Both modules test comprehension you almost certainly already have. What they punish is spending eleven minutes on a matching-headings set and then rushing the last passage.
We work on a fixed per-section time budget and on the specific question types that eat the clock — True/False/Not Given in Reading, and multi-speaker sections in Listening where the answer is corrected mid-sentence.
Academic or General Training
Academic IELTS is for university admission and most professional registration. General Training is for skilled migration and work, and its Writing Task 1 is a letter rather than a data description.
The Listening and Speaking modules are identical between the two. If you are unsure which you need, check the requirement on your visa subclass or university offer before booking — sitting the wrong one is an expensive mistake we see more often than you would expect. Score Smart also runs a dedicated IELTS General Training program.
Band 7 and what it takes
Band 7 in every module is the common requirement for skilled migration points and for many professional bodies. Moving from 6.5 to 7 in Writing is usually the slowest step, because it requires consistency rather than a single technique.
Book the free trial for a diagnostic and an honest read on how far you are from your target and how long it is likely to take.