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This question is asked surprisingly often at workshops and conferences I attend. When I respond by asking what is meant by “harder”, the reply usually concerns the assumption that candidates don’t get high scores as often as they did before. Our data, however, show that this assumption is incorrect. Results from the IELTS White Paper project launched in 2017 reveal that the average overall score for IELTS candidates in China actually showed an upward trend from 2012-2017 (see Figure 1 below), with particular improvements in Reading.
It is possible that the belief in the growing difficulty of IELTS is the result of small sample sizes collected by teachers of IELTS, who may have had stronger students in the past who did, in fact, get higher IELTS scores. Another possibility is that, as with many popular beliefs, the feeling that IELTS is getting harder is a misconception generated through word of mouth, without much evidence being asked for in support of it. The improvement shown in Figure 1 below does not, by extension, prove that IELTS is getting easier; it suggests, instead, that IELTS candidates in China are improving the skills required to do well in the test.
Figure 1 (results from IELTS White Paper, 2017)
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