The last week before IELTS: what to do and what to stop doing

Seven days out, your English is what it is. Vocabulary breadth, grammatical control, listening comprehension — these move on a scale of months, and nothing you cram this week reaches the exam. What the last week can move is the gap between your ability and your score: the half-band routinely lost to pacing mistakes, unread instructions, repeat errors you already know about, and arriving tired. The week's job is to close that gap, and its enemy is the panicked instinct to learn more, faster, later into the night.

Days 7–5: the last full rehearsal

Sit one complete mock under real conditions — all four skills, exam timing, no pauses, Writing by hand or typed to match the version you booked. One, not three: a full mock costs most of a day and real focus, and its value is diagnostic, not muscular. Back-to-back mocks in the final week are how candidates arrive at the real test pre-exhausted.

Then spend a half-day mining it. Not "review" — mining, with two outputs:

1. A pacing verdict per skill. Where did the clock actually go? Which Reading passage overran, which Writing task got squeezed? Fix the schedule, not the English: if Task 2 got 32 minutes, the correction is starting it first next time, and that is a decision you can rehearse this week.
2. Your error list. Every mistake, one line each, sorted into: careless (misread instruction, word-limit breach), repeat offender (your two or three signature grammar errors), and genuinely-didn't-know. The third category gets abandoned — that is next month's English. The first two are this week's entire syllabus (the full error-log method, if you are building the list for the first time).

Days 4–3: short, sharp, targeted

Two or three sessions a day, 40–60 minutes each, everything aimed at the error list:

• One timed section daily (a Reading passage at its checkpoint time — a free real passage serves — or a Listening part) — enough to keep pacing calibrated, never a full paper.
• One Writing task daily, alternating Task 1 and Task 2, followed by ten minutes hunting specifically for your repeat errors. Finding your own signature error in your own fresh writing is the highest-value drill of the week — it trains the exam-day proofread to look for the right things.
• Speaking out loud daily, ten Part 1/Part 3 questions recorded on your phone. Fluency decays measurably within days of not speaking; this is maintenance, and it costs fifteen minutes.

What is off the menu from day 4: new vocabulary lists, new question types you've never practised, new strategy videos. Anything new this week displaces consolidation of what already works, and half-learned material is exam-day noise.

Day 2: logistics and one light pass

Kill every source of test-day friction while your head is still clear:

• Identity document — the exact one you registered with; centres refuse alternatives.
• Route and arrival time — plan to arrive 45–60 minutes early; find the actual building on a map, not the general street.
• Know your version's mechanics — paper: pencils, transfer time, answer sheet; computer: one last familiarisation section so the interface costs zero attention.
• Speaking schedule — confirm whether your Speaking is the same day or a different one; a surprising number of candidates discover this at the venue.

Study today is one light session: reread your error list, redo five questions of the type that went worst in the mock, stop.

Day 1: rest is the strategy

The day before, do approximately nothing. Twenty minutes with the error list, a short walk, food you trust, and sleep at your normal time — not earlier, which usually backfires into lying awake. A rested band-6.5 candidate outperforms a drained band-7 one across four hours of sustained attention, and the final sections of Listening and the second Writing task are exactly where fatigue collects its fee.

Test morning

Eat, arrive early, and give the error list one two-minute glance — not to learn it, but to prime the proofreading pass. During the test, your week's preparation cashes out as three habits: check the word limit before every completion task, start the Writing task you scheduled first, and leave ninety seconds at the end of Reading and Listening for blanks. Nothing on the paper will care how you felt about your preparation; it will only record what the prepared habits did.