I took Academic exam a month ago after a week of actual preparation. I scored 8.0 overall with the following breakdown: listening 8.5, reading 9.0, writing 8.0, speaking 7.0.
I am a non-native speaker and I haven't formally studied English for the last 8 years.
So here is what I did in terms of preparation during that week. I had 6 days and I could devote to studying 1-2 hours every evening.
First I learned about the exam and its parts on the official site. Then I searched Youtube for some strategies of the preparation and that's how I found Ryan's videos. I watched 1 video on a different topic every day in the following days.
I tried several tasks for listening and reading on the first day to understand the format and figured out that I could do both parts with just a few mistakes. In reading the most difficult type of question for me was the TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN so in later days I researched tips and tricks on this topic. As for the listening part the only problem I could work on during this limited time was the fact that I'm more accustomed to the American accent so I downloaded about 10 podcasts on scientific subjects by Discovery BBC and listened to them during commute every day till the exam.
I felt less comfortable about writing, especially graph description. I found model essays for different kinds of graphs on ieltsbuddy. In order to get the feel of the structure I copied by hand one essay of each kind (6 essays in total). While copying I tried to actively understand the order of the arguments and why certain phrases were chosen. I also read actively 1 or 2 essays for the second part every evening. I didn't write anything because I didn't want to lose the time that I could spend on analyzing model essays and the other reason was that I was too tired after work (quite hectic week I had).
During the exam I didn't have any particular difficulties with listening. Probably I could've been more attentive but I'm happy with the result anyway. As for the reading I had to reread the third text several times because even though I understood every word and the text in general it was still hard to answer TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN questions and I'm a bit surprised that I got 9.0 after all
In the writing part I managed to finish both essays just in time (turned out my method worked). Speaking part was the only part that I hadn't had time and opportunity to practice and that's why I think I've got significantly lower score.
