This is why you failed your OET exam and our advice on what you should do next
There could be many reasons as to why you failed in your speaking, reading, writing or listening exams. Let’s take speaking for example;
- Your pronunciation wasn’t correct, maybe there was a lot of grammatical mistakes
- Or you didn’t have a range of vocabulary in your answers. Maybe you kept saying “I understand”, “I understand how you feel”, “I understand the problems”, “I understand”, “I understand”- and so on. Using the exact same words, again and again, shows you don’t have much variety in your English vocabulary so that could be an issue too.
- Maybe you did not show any reassurance or empathy
- Or you didn’t cover the bullet points that were on the topic card
- Probably you were interrupting the interlocutor
- You were not asking open-ended questions or maybe you didn’t ask any questions
- You didn’t use the full five minutes of the role-play.
There could be so many other factors on why you didn’t get the score that you needed in terms of your speaking exam. In your preparation, did you have a mock exam? If you didn’t, then maybe you didn’t have the confidence to know that you could be getting a B or an A.
Go ahead in your exam because our Swoosh VIP students, for example, do speaking mock exam classes every single week.
Last week, we did three mock exam-speaking classes where we had lots of students practicing. This practice allows them to boost their confidence.
We can do a one-to-one speaking mock exam and tell you what you’re doing right and wrong. What you need to do to improve, as well as giving you a grade estimation. And what you need to do to get a B from where you’re at currently.
We provide students with study partners as well. With a study partner, you can practice with each other. Sometimes you could be the interlocutor and they can be the patient. Then you can switch and you can build up the confidence that way. And of course, the best situation is always to find a teacher who can tell you what your mistakes are.
For reading, did you not practice your skimming and scanning skills? Did you just focus on the OET practice mock exam papers or the sample papers? Because if you just do that, then you’re missing out on a lot of amazingly effective preparation that you could get from non-OET practice materials.
You can go to the newspaper, websites; you can go to TED Talks (they call them TED-ED Talks). Or go on to Google and find materials there. You can listen to TED talks and read the transcripts for all the speeches.
Find medical podcasts for listening and practice with those because there are loads of great materials there. You could also use some of the old OET exam materials that we have. Don’t be confused with these because the format is different now with 2.0 being introduced. However, there are lots of OET 1.0 examination papers you can practice with. Those are still great because it is the same skills that they’re testing you on. They’re still testing you in skimming and scanning for reading.
If you’re planning to take the OET exam, we’ve got an OET FREE 3-part video course which you can easily download on our website www.swooshenglish.com. For writing, for example:
- Probably you weren’t writing enough letters. And maybe you didn’t get any feedback from a teacher. And you didn’t have the right advice and the right techniques to follow
- You were following too many YouTube videos. this teacher or that teacher. Who were all saying different things and this caused you some confusion.
- You didn’t get grade estimations for your writing. Because that’s what we do with our VIP students as we’re constantly giving them corrections on their writing. And we tell them whether they are at a grade A/B etc., or whether they are at a grade C/C+. Do you know what your writing level is right now? This is important. We tell our students what they need to do to improve as well as all the vocabulary/grammar corrections they need.
All the aforementioned factors are crucial for your writing. If you took your exam before and you only got a C-plus. It might be time for you to spend some money on getting a teacher to give you writing corrections. Of course, there is no school or teacher that can guarantee you will pass. Because even if we give you all of our live classes or recordings of the live classes. Our writing correction service and our OET video courses etc, and you don’t do the work, you will not pass. You could spend money on our courses but if you don’t do the work, you won’t get the grades that you are looking for.
It takes the teacher and the student to work hard on both sides. The combination of the two is what will help you to get your grade A’s/B’s in all four areas. I can tell you that we’ve had a fantastic success rate where we’ve got over 65% of our students passing the first time. But, it’s not hundred percent because not everyone is passing. Yet, we sit down with those students that did not pass. And tell them what they need to do differently so that next time we can prepare them in moving forward.
I wish you all the best with your OET preparation. If you’ve got any questions about this article, make sure you put them in the message box. If you’re planning to take the OET exam, we’ve got an OET FREE 3-part video course which you can easily download on our website www.swooshenglish.com.
Your OET teacher, Alex Do you prefer a video of Alex explaining what to do when you fail your exam? Click on the video above to watch!
