Here is the breakdown of Yash’s improvement

• Listening: 7.5 to 9
• Reading: 8 to 9
• Writing: 6 to 7.5
• Speaking: 7 to 7.5
• Overall: 7.5 to 8.5

Here is a summary of Yash’s advice:

Writing

• Write task 1 and task 2 every day.
• Analyse your mistakes. Keep a record of all of your mistakes in a Word file that you can revise regularly.
• Work on your weaknesses. Yash identified that he struggled with articles, so he did lots of practice activities to improve.
• Read band 9 essays and compare them to the answers that you have written. Focus on what you can do to make your essays similar to the band 9 answers.
• Check each sentence for mistakes as you write your IELTS essays.
• Give yourself 3-5 minutes at the end of the writing test to check over your writing.
• Try writing task 2 before writing task 1.
• Have a predefined structure for each essay type (Agree/ Advantage/ Discussion/ Double Question). This will allow you to write your essays quickly.

Vocabulary

• Don’t waste your time learning words from the Academic Word List
• Learn content specific collocations for each of the common topics. Yash recommends a book called IELTS Band 9 Vocab Secrets

Speaking

• Watch Keith’s YouTube videos and learn some of the phrasal verbs and idioms that he teaches you. Yash particularly liked the video from Keith on idioms for expressing feelings.
• Get a speaking partner and practise regularly. Yash practised with his speaking partner every day. Ideally, you want a speaking partner that is at a similar level and can point out your mistakes.

Listening and Reading

• Do all of the Cambridge Past Papers. Yash did books 10-15 so many times that he knew many of the answers by memory.
• Do the free IELTS Listening Tests on the YouTube channel Crack IELTS with Rob.
• Be careful of common errors, such as singular vs. plural errors, capital letters and spelling mistakes.
• Do the computer-based reading test and copy and paste the text into your question paper. This will help you to avoid spelling mistakes.