Surviving the PTE madness

It has taken a while but here I am, writing my second blog post.

To be honest, writing the first post was a walk in the park compared to the second one posing the big question “And what now?!“. The world is literally at your feed, opening up and showing you all the different ways this blog and this next post could take:

• Should you take the winding pathway going up the mountains rewarding the climb with a stunning view of the valley below?
• Or should you take the relaxing and slightly sandy walkway down to the beach where you can get comfortable in the warm sand watching the waves come and go?
• Or should you just disregards all of these and choose the muddy path that seems to be going slippery and steeply downhill into the darkness and you don’t have a clue where you will come out?

As you can probably imagine, it was just too easy to get overwhelmed with the options of what this post could be and what I could do with it that I ended up pushing it further and further away until about half a year was over since my first post. Then I finally decided to just go with what was right in front of me – the upcoming PTE exam.

For those of you, who are not trying to settle in Australia, the PTE exam is an English test that anyone who wants to stay in this country longer term needs to power through with all that they got and cross the finish line passing with flying colours. Anything else will simply not get you the points that you will need for your visa application.

So what could we do but bent to the rules once again and shut ourselves away from the world to study for this beast.
For Amro, it wasn’t his first round – he had previously done the PTE exam for his initial visa to Australia. So, for him it was a re-do of the first time and ever so hard to accomplish the same grandios results as it is just nothing anyone wants to do more than once in their life – it is not particularly interesting (even for someone like Amro who nerds out with studying and simply loves to learn), it is frustrating as we can speak English but the machine tells us otherwise and it simply drains your energy as you just want it to be over with.
For myself, it was the first time taking the test as we were now simply trying to get more points to add on to our visa application and I can tell you, the exam anxiety has not gotten any better since university, to the point where I was breaking out all over my face simply because I was so extremely stressed to have to pass this exam on the first go. You are asking why on the first go? Let me tell you:

• It is not cheap to do this exam – the exam itself costs a couple of hundred bucks and then you need to purchase expensive study material additionally;
• I am not at all a big fan of studying, especially if I can speak English but again the machine tells you a complete different story;
• It takes a lot of time of your week, not just as it brings a lot of anxiety with it that rents a big space of your head but it also takes time to study – each mock exam is about 3 hours.

Passing the exam? We surely did – thanks to Amro’s amazing ability to find the simplest and best pattern to ensure we will ace this exam. Here is what we did:

• We purchased cheap mock exams from realpte.com,
• We continuously went through full 3 hour mock exams on the weekend to get used to the questions and procedure of the exam,
• We used the results to find out in which areas we need to do more and continued with single questions on the same website,
• We then purchased real mock exams from the Pearson website to see how we would score on the test day and again used these results to find our weak points,
• In the end, we built our own templates especially for the speaking exercises in order to score high in fluency, vocabulary and grammar – hands down, this was the key to our good results!

If you are taking the test, know you do not have to make sense in what you are saying or writing as long as you hit certain key words, use good vocabulary, have excellent grammar and spelling as well as fluency in speaking. The rest is simply training yourself to understand the different question types and study them over and over again until you can do it in your sleep.

As we have our templates set up, I will compile a brief overview and upload them over here, maybe it will give some of you an idea on where to start. To anyone who is going to do the exam now or in the future – good luck!

I certainly hope we will not have to do it again at any point in our future. But to be honest, I am not throwing my papers out yet as I truly believe its mainly a money making machine as it is just expensive especially considering it expires within just three years. Now I do get that there may be people whose English skills will deteriorate over time if it is not used, but honestly, I am in Australia, living and working and pretty sure my English skills will not fade away. But who am I to talk – there may be a good reason behind all of this and this is just my own frustration speaking.

For a second post this may have been a bit dull for everyone who is not looking at doing PTE anytime soon, but I am so very glad it got me going on just putting more content out there until I find my niche, my writing flow or whatever you might call it. Hopefully it will also over time help with the anxiety of posting more content without being stuck in my head overthinking the whole thing for half a year – let’s see how we go with the next one!