IELTS vs. TOEFL iBT (and The Blue Footed B00bies!)

After 2 month of waiting, I finally had my IELTS test taken here in Tehran. Studying for IELTS and having IELTS is kind of a fashion around here, not to mention that most people need it as well. So, I thought let’s try killing the beast and see what happens. I had my TOEFL iBT exam around 2 years ago and I was curious to see the differences between these 2 exams, I mean IELTS vs. TOEFL iBT. After all each side is blowing in its horn and there are countries who accept only IELTS, even if you have a high score in TOEFL iBT!

Long story short, I don’t consider IELTS a real English test! I don’t think it’s standard and I do believe the ielts.org thinks more about money than the most boasted about scientific part of the equation. Why? Well, there are couple of reasons:

• If you want to register for TOEFL, no matter where you are in the world, you should go to one main address: www.ets.org; that’s it, no more hassle. What about IELTS? Well, just in Iran, we have 2 different registrars, IELTS Iran and IELTS Tehran. The funny thing is, they have their own different procedures! You don’t see any centralized system, for gods sake, even their website interfaces are different. In one website the picture you have to upload of yourself can not be more than 10KBs (yeah! Just 10KBs), in the other one, well, it’s ok to go couple of more kbs! It all reminds me of some Food chained stores reseller programs, the guys who wanted to be the resellers (Test sub-centers if I don’t wana insult anyone) just paid the money to the main IELTS.org and got their permission. As long as they obey to some rules of taking the test, the rest is not important!
• Sending your TOEFL iBT results to any university in the world only costs ya $17, yes, nothing more. Not only they send a copy to that university from ets.org headquarters itself, they’d also send one recite to you wherever you are (for me, Iran). What about IELTS? Well, only issuing a certificate costs ya $50, sending it via international post is another story, it can cost ya anything between $30 to $50, so, the best case: you should pay at least $80 for one of your certificates to be sent to a university.
• In TOEFL iBT you’re placed inside a cubicle with a computer which you interact and answer all the 4 skill questions, i.e. reading, writing, listening and speaking. It could be hard for those who are not that much comfortable with a computer, specially those who are afraid of machines taking the time or are not touch typists. In the other hand, in IELTS, you’re placed inside a big hall with almost 1000 other participants! At the beginning they read ya the instructions that are mostly about DOs and Don’ts for about 10 minutes. Instructions like “If you look left, it’s cheating, If you look right, it’s cheating, if you look at anywhere but your paper, it’s cheating!”, damn, you feel like a kindergartner! And there is this Doctor at the session, whom whenever raise his hand and says “Stop the test”, everybody should put their pencil down and stop the test! They deliberately try to make ya more anxious, from reading you the rules, to the cameras that show you your picture on the wall to show off that they can see ya whenever they want and not forgetting to mention, how many times they repeat: “We know this test is important to you, we know how important it is to you!”.
• It happens 2 or 3 times at least during the test that the doctor just finds something suspicious and starts jabbering out loud and you have to listen to all of that. If he’s disciplining a girl about how she should keep her head straight to her paper, the others have to listen to him clear and loud, it might be a good lesson for all of them!
• The listening section is not a standard test in my humble opinion, because first of all, you hear something, but then in the answer sheet, the phrase you see is paraphrased, it’s not exactly what you heard, but you have to enter the 2 or 3 words missing exactly as you heard them in the listening! Considering the fact that what is put in the answer sheet is itself paraphrased, you should be allowed to write a paraphrased version of the answer, not the exact verbatim words. In some questions, the answers are dependent on each other, i.e. if you don’t hear one phrase, you won’t be able to answer several questions! For example in a question that asks for directions, if you don’t hear the first answer which says for instance you have to go up and then turn left to reach Point A, then you won’t be able to answer the next part, because you simply don’t know from where you should start or where in the map you are.
• TOEFL iBT has only multiple choice questions, it means if you understand something, you’d most probably choose the right answer in the choices you got. IELTS in the other hand almost has no multiple choice question, you have to fill in the blanks with your own beautiful handwriting!
• The speaking test is on a different day, it means it’s another hassle! Some people have their speaking test prior to their main (listening, reading & writing) test and they should check the website to find out whether their speaking is after the main test (most people are), or it’s before that. Lots of people forget, and I can see the good doctor’s face hearing this argument: “Forget? they should NOT, they are not ALLOWED to forget!”. No dear doctor, human is fallible, you could simply use their damn emails or cell phones to send them an email or a text message as a reminder. It’s 21st century and such technology isn’t considered so novel no longer! After all you’re charging us damn good, so, we might expect a little more than a bottle of mineral water and a pencil and eraser for the session!
• You’re supposed to talk in English with the invigilators, except 2 or 3 of them who are actually the test takers themselves and are mostly British, the other invigilators can’t speak English at all! I could only see one guy who could speak English whose accent was far worse than Mulla Mohammed Omar, if he’s ever captured!

On in all it’s real fun! The instructions they kept repeating only made it funnier to me. My first reading title was “Blue footed b00bies”, which was great! It took all the stress away and I thought the test is merely customized for me! Blue footed b00bies are kind of birds somewhere in the world (I really don’t care) who were so tamed and dumb at the time Spanish people entered their island, so, you could easily approach them, pick’em up and eat them! So, they’re called bubu I guess which means “stupid” in Spanish, later on it’s changed to b00bies by English people!

I do believe these 2 tests are money scams in the best case, coz I see no reason why some countries shouldn’t accept TOEFL and only go for IELTS or vice versa. But if I want to vote for one of them, as it’s apparent in my previous paragraphs, I’d definitely vote for TOEFL iBT, even though it might be a lot harder for the computer illiterate or those who are more willing to see a human face in the speaking test rather than a monitor. I also believe you shouldn’t put 1000 people in a huge hall and scare’em so much that they don’t even utter a hiss!