IELTS Temple: I'm a Mean Teacher - and the IELTS is a Mean Test

I’m a bad online mentor when it comes to informal IELTS coaching. Twenty-five years of provoking people, ruthlessly engaging in pointless internet fights, and making fun of things that others find oh so serious has led me to take an approach to this whole free IELTS mentoring hobby of mine that, unfortunately, annoys some and infuriates others. I've driven people off the Tips and Tricks group. I've had advice flatly rejected. I've even been a cause in people deciding not to do the IELTS at all. Crushing dreams because I point out you misunderstood the question.

Then there are those who understand my sense of humor. There’s no greater reward for me personally
than to hear a student tell me that they not only learned something, but got a laugh while doing it. That profoundly satisfies something in me.

I'm not mean at all in my real
classroom. We get along great.
Rewards like this message
from a few days are right up
there with getting a laugh.

That said, I’ll admit that occasionally, I can be a bit mean. Perhaps though that’s what IELTS candidates need. My jokes pale in comparison to the test’s intricate trickery. In a way, there’s no bigger meanie than the IELTS test itself.

As I have told my classroom students many times, often after we’ve analyzed how a particular listening or reading question had been written to trick them into producing the wrong answer (which most did), if the IELTS were a person, they would be horrible! They would be the biggest jerk you’d ever met in your life – not someone you’d want to hang out with. They’d have “public descriptors” and private ones. They’d trick you just to make you look stupid. They’d ask you questions that imply one thing, and then after you've answered based on that assumption, they slap you a TR score of 6 for not understanding their question.

It was with that deceptiveness in mind that I approached composing another poll to test your ability to answer the key question when analyzing a “to what extent do you agree or disagree” type opinion question. That is:
What exactly are we being asked to agree or disagree with?

90% of the responses picked the incorrect answer. Let's go over why that is.

#1 is pretty straightforwardly a bad choice. It may be safely assumed those who agree with what the question is actually trying to express would agree with this statement too, but it isn't enough.

#4 is me being mean and tricking you. Too many students treat paraphrasing like a game where they simply pull-and-replace one word for another without changing the sentence structure. I knew that by using "Individuals, enjoy, hobby, more pleasure", people were going to think paraphrase and see those as replacing "people, pleasure, free time, and better"... Sure enough nearly 1/3rd picked this option.

#2 exemplifies the problem of confusing the main idea with the cause or result of that idea. There is no mention of imagination being improved or the development of the "skill" of imagination anywhere in the thesis. Again, it may be true, but it's not at question in this essay.

The answer is #3. Why?

"A preference for..." In the question it says "those who prefer TV" as one of two items in a comparison. It can be safely assumed the "WHO ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?" question can be answered with those who prefer the other side: extensive readers.

I feel a little bit guilty because I did something I've told many students not to: I used jargon, AKA job-specific vocabulary. I tricked 90% of you with this term: "extensive reading", which was kind of surprising because it's one of the first things I teach in an English for academic purposes class and always get round to it in IELTS.

Extensive reading is one the four ways ways in which we read, and it in academic English, it means "reading for pleasure". Of course, in this instance, we know that a panel of IELTS judges knows the meaning of "extensive" in this context.
The phrase:"tends to coincide with" is a way to hedge when meaning "have".

"A more imaginative mind" = better imagination.

The author for our essay analysis tonight on the question of the poll was mentioned in the intro,..