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The Academic Listening test consists of 4 parts and takes 30 minutes. It assesses your ability to understand main ideas, detailed information, opinions, purpose and attitudes of the speakers, as well as your ability to follow the development of ideas.

You will listen to 4 recordings in your Academic Listening test and need to answer 40 questions based on these recordings. The first two recordings deal with situations you might experience in an everyday context. The last two recordings, however, focus on situations that might occur in an education or training context.

In recordings 1 and 3 you will hear a conversation between two or more speakers, however in recordings 2 and 4 will hear a monologue. You will need to answer questions connected to the recordings ranging from multiple choice to matching information, headings, features and sentence endings, as well as sentence, summary, note, table, diagram or flow-chart completion.

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What is the difference between raw scores and band scores?

The Listening and Reading parts of the IELTS test  are scored out of 40 and then converted  to a  band score which ranges  from  band 1  to  band 9.


The Listening and Reading tests contain 40 questions and each correct question will be awarded 1 mark (so the maximum a test  taker can score here is 40).  Band scores, ranging from band 1 to band 9, are  awarded based on the raw scores.  

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