Hey Chris here from IELTS advantage so is IELTS a scam? So many of you will not
like the answer to this question and many of you will not like this video at
all. The purpose of this video is not to please everybody, it's not to make me
popular, it's to get through to the the one or two percent of people who
will watch this video and actually take on board what I'm trying to say. So the
answer to that question is IELTS a scam? Is actually yes and no, I'll explain this
in this video. So why am I making this video? Well first of all it's not a
marketing video 99.99% of the stuff that we produce is free and the 0.001%
of people that we work with we choose those people and we only work
with people who we're really interested in working with and who have the right
mindset and the right attitude, so it's not about becoming popular or trying to
get people onto our course it's because we receive emails every single day, and
I'm sitting in front of my computer now, from people who email us so let me just
look at one now 'Hi Chris it is well known that IELTS examiner's
purposely give 6.5 in writing multiple times'. So we receive maybe you know 40 to
50 emails every week like this from people who are convinced that the IELTS
test is a scam and that somehow the IELTS organisation is purposely failing
people because the way that they think is if people are failed then they'll
repeat the test and IELTS, IDP and the British Council will make more money.
So as I said it is it a scam yes or no? Yes and no, let me explain this so in
order to explain it I want to tell you a true story about a son, a father, a
grandfather and this is going to make a lot of sense don't worry and this will
explain why people think it's a scam perfectly and so my little boy he's
four-and-a-half, nearly 5 years old now and when he was very small we used to live
in a place that had like a shared playground so there were slides and
seesaws and swings and you know normal kids playground and there was a dad and
his son around the same age and the little boy would always fall off the
slide and hit his head and you know fall off the swings he was really, really,
clumsy and whenever he hit his head like all kids do but this kid hit his head
quite a lot and what the father would do would go over and say like 'bad slide, bad
swing' and they would blame the swing or blame the slide for the little boy
hitting his head when really it was just an accident or the little boy was being
careless or the father just wasn't paying enough attention and normally we
took our kids there you know in the evening time about 6 or 7 p.m. and he'd
normally finished work and what this guy would do would explain either why he had
just lost his job because in the time I knew him, I maybe knew him for
about six months. He had like five or six different jobs and he would explain why
his boss was an idiot, the people who he worked with were
terrible, the people who he taught, he was an English teacher by the
way and the students were terrible and it was always someone else's fault
he was always blaming it on other people and I got really tiresome listening to
him because he would even blame the economy, he would
blame local politicians, he would blame the government. But very rarely
blame himself, if ever, and then it clicked why this little boy kept
hitting his head and his father kept losing his job one day the grandfather
and so the father of the father showed up and it turned out through listening
to the conversation that he was a gambler he would often go to the casino
and he would play blackjack and he would play
roulette and what he would he would normally always lose and what he would
say is the casino was scamming him that the casino is a scam that blackjack is a
scam that roulette is a scam and one day I said to him well it seems as if it's
like an objective game it it seems like a very fair game and the casino is not
dragging you in and trying to gyp you or trying to fill you in anyway then I'm
forcing you to do anything. Maybe you just have a problem with
gambling and it became very clear that this grandfather had passed
this attitude down to his son and his son was passing it on to the little boy
by saying you know it's not your fault that you fell off the slide
it's the slides fault so three generations of this family took no
personal responsibility for their own actions it was always someone else's
fault and they would say that you know the casino is a scam and their boss is an
idiot and the students that they thought were unreasonable and the little
boy will probably grow up having this attitude and this is the attitude that
people who really believe that the IELTS test is a scam have because it's much
easier to blame a system or blame other people or accuse someone of doing you
wrong rather than accept the fact that you are responsible for your own actions
just like that grandfather was responsible and he he was totally at
fault for wasting all his money in a casino you are at fault if you do the
tests before you are ready to do the tests, don't get the score that you need
and then you blame the IELTS test. The IELTS test is not perfect, I'm not saying
it is perfect but it is as near a perfect English test as exists in the
world right now and it is very objective and in my experience and I work with, you
know, I've worked with thousands of students over the years. In my experience
the vast, vast, vast majority get the score that they deserve
but when they get that score and it's very difficult for them to accept that
that was their fault that's that is a fair reflection of their own
ability and it's a very easy thing to say 'oh well
IELTS are just trying to make money it's a business it's a scam' that's a very
easy thing to do and like so it's it's easy to blame your boss or your
co-workers for your performance at work it's easy to blame your wife and your
kids for being not spending time with them it's more difficult to be a good
father it's easy to blame the economy or Donald Trump or your local politicians
for you not having you know as much money as you want it's more difficult to
actually work really really hard and you know or set up a business or work really
hard on your career that's really difficult so is IELTS a scam? No it's not and
what is the problem? So the problem is that people are not prepared to have an
honest conversation with themselves and to realize that it is their
responsibility to move up to the level that they need to move up to. So at the
beginning of this video I said in response to is the IELTS test it's scam?
I said yes and no. IELTS itself so when I'm talking about
that I'm talking about the test itself and Cambridge and British Council and IDP
they are not scamming anybody. However, the IELTS industry, let me be
very, very specific what I mean about the IELTS industry I'm not talking about IDP
or the British Council or Cambridge, I'm talking about the industry that has
grown around the IELTS test of people setting up schools and websites and
blogs and YouTube channels, that is probably scamming you, I say probably
because not every school is bad not every teacher is bad
not every YouTube channel is bad not every piece of the IELTS industry that
helps people with the test is bad but a lot of it is.
But why is that? Well when you get, I think it was between I don't know the
exact figures, like two to three million people did the test last year but maybe
there were two or three million tests done them so let's say it's about it's a
lot of people as millions of people doing the test. What happens when you
have a life-changing test so a test that is literally the barrier between you
having your dream life and not having it like you getting the job you want you
moving to the country you want you having that dream life that's in the
future you want the only thing stopping you getting there is the IELTS test what
happens when you have such a high-stakes test and people are really desperate to
get the score that they need but not a lot of great resources to help people.
There's a lot of great teachers out there. There's more bad ones. There's a
lot of great resources and courses out there, there are more bad ones and what
happens is you'll get criminals and charlatans and people pretending that
they know what they're doing coming in and offering their services to make
money what happens when you have that kind of a toxic environment and that
kind of toxic industry is you will get a lot of people getting the wrong advice
because these, let's say, bad actors are more interested in your money than they
are helping you improve your scores and then this just feeds into the cycle of
'IELTS is a scam' because you will go to some, let's say you go to some, school in
your local area where they say 'come to our school and we'll teach you the
secrets of getting the IELTS score you need' or 'come to our school and we
guarantee you a Band 9 in six weeks' which is all bullshit by the way it's
just to have separate you from your money. You'll go to these schools they'll
tell you about these magic secrets that are nonsense you'll go and do the test
you will fail and then you it makes this idea that it is a scam even stronger
because you're thinking oh I learned all the secrets, I learned
the best IELTS teacher in my local area who tells me he's amazing and I still
didn't get the score I needed that means that it is a scam. So is it a scam? No, it
is not a scam. But many of the people that you are dealing with whether that's
your local teachers whether that's teachers online without YouTube channels
whether that's Facebook groups whatever, all those different things
many of them are scamming you my definition of a scam is telling people
lies so that you can get money from them. Many people are doing that to you so as
I said at the beginning of this video many of you will hate what I am saying
right now because it means what does it mean it means that if you accept that
IELTS is pretty fair and your score is actually a reflection of your current
ability and you've been listening to the wrong people who are telling you that
it's really easy and you just have to learn some secrets and tips and tricks
that means that 'A' you have to take personal responsibility for your own
scores and 'B' start working really, really hard because it is going to take a lot
of work to get there. It is not complicated, it's actually that simple
the one thing that our students say when when they join our course is 'I can't
believe how simple it actually is'. It does take quite a lot of work but when
you consider in the you know thinking about it long term many of the people
who we help when you can check out all our success stories we've helped them
become doctors in Canada or software developers in America or nurses in the
UK. Like they are going to get the benefit of that hard work for the next
30, 40, 50 years their family, through gathering wealth and might have that for
hundreds of years so do you think that you should join some scam artist who
gives you a list of tips and tricks or should you just work hard for you know
four to six weeks and get the score that you need and then you can forget about
this silly test and not have to worry about it being a
scam many of you will still believe it is a scam feel free to comment below and
I will personally respond to you with logic and base my arguments in logic
not in some conspiracy theory. I'd love to hear from you, I would love to hear why
you think that that you disagree with me and I'm very happy for you to disagree
with me but for that one or two percent of people watching this video who do
agree with me and do have that hard conversation with themselves feel free
to get in touch with me and we can have a conversation about helping you move
forward and but as he said I'm gonna get a lot of hate and because I'm not
telling you that there's an easy way of doing things and I'm kind of exposing a
lot of problems with the industry and but one of our missions is to clean up
the industry and actually help people as much as we can and if you are, you know,
the owner of a school, or a teacher, or the owner of a website and you think the
tips and tricks work and you think that you know you can guarantee a Band 9
please feel free to comment I'd love to engage with you and hear why you think
that's true. Thanks very much guys I hope that you find that useful and looking
forward to hear looking at your comments. Thank you, bye!