Official material
Everything genuinely official, ranked by what it's worth to you with four weeks left. Every link below was fetched and its HTTP status observed — nothing here is cited from memory.
Key websites
The two sites you asked to keep in front of you, in your order. Everything below this section is the official and free material; these two are where you go first for teaching and for extra timed practice.
Free — and worth more than most paid courses
Official full-length tests in the real exam engine
The actual computer-delivered interface you'll sit on the day — same screen, same navigation. Untimed and not auto-marked, so run your own clock.
Listening — 4 recordings, 40 questions
Academic Reading — 3 passages, 40 questions
Academic Writing — both tasks
The answer keys for those tests
Hosted by IDP, not linked from the test pages. Without these the demos are a walkthrough; with them they're three scorable papers.
Reading answer key (PDF, 618 KB)
Listening answer key (PDF, 1.0 MB)
IDP familiarisation hub
Marked writing scripts with examiner comments — up to band 8.5
Real candidate answers, their band scores, and the examiner's reasoning. The highest- value free hour available to you: you cannot hit a target you have never seen. Band 9 scripts do not exist publicly — 8.5 is the ceiling.
Academic writing sample tasks 2023 — two band 8.5 scripts (1.5 MB)
Responses with band scores + examiner comments (492 KB)
Cambridge's free sample-papers ZIP — 8.2 MB, 44 files
The only free source of official Speaking audio with transcripts: three MP3s of real examiner-conducted speaking tests, plus four Listening MP3s, task PDFs for every question type, and 12 pages of marked writing scripts.
The marking rubrics themselves
The band descriptors examiners actually use. Read the band 8 row before you write anything — and note the difference between 7 (“majority of sentences error-free”) and 8.
Writing band descriptors ·
Speaking band descriptors
Writing criteria in prose ·
Speaking criteria in prose
Official “how Writing is marked” video series — 7 videos
One per marking criterion, from the IELTS Official channel. This page is not in the main preparation navigation; it was found via the sitemap.
Per-question-type drills, all types, with keys
8 Listening and 10 Academic Reading task-type drills in the live exam engine, each with an answer key and Listening transcripts. Use for targeted weakness work once your review page tells you which type is leaking.
Two distilled references from the planner
Written for this sprint, from the official documents above.
Band descriptors 7 / 8 / 9, side by side
What actually separates each band on every criterion, extracted from the official Writing and Speaking descriptor PDFs — so you read the target, not a paraphrase.
Requirements check, 2 Sep 2026
What US/Canada graduate programmes and competitive scholarships actually ask for in IELTS terms, and where 8.5 sits against them.
Worth paying for
Free material covers format and self-diagnosis completely — but it contains zero complete assembled Academic papers. That is the one thing money buys that nothing else substitutes for.
Cambridge IELTS 21 Academic — and one older volume
Four complete authentic retired papers per book, with audio, answer keys, sample writing answers and example speaking videos. Buying two volumes gives you eight real papers — two a week for four weeks, which is the right dose.
Cambridge IELTS 21 Academic — £38.93 from Cambridge's own shop
Volumes 16–21 all currently listed, roughly £22–39 each.
Two cautions
ieltsready.com is a parked domain listed for sale (I loaded it:
“ieltsready.com for sale | Spaceship.com”).
roadtoielts.com claims to be “the British Council's official online
preparation course” with 9 mock tests, but it is a 7 KB static site whose every button
links back to itself — no login, no pricing, no product. The genuine Road to IELTS is built
by Clarity English and sold to institutions.
A verification note worth carrying:
ielts.idp.com serves
soft 404s — a page that doesn't exist still returns HTTP 200 with a
generic template. So a 200 from IDP proves nothing on its own; the content has to be
checked. I found one dead link on this site that way and fixed it.
That gap is exactly what the writing exam on this site exists to fill.
Books — and the free legal way to read them
You own both of the books this section used to point elsewhere for. The
full Cambridge course — The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS — and
New Insight into IELTS are in materials/books/, served by this site's own
reader. There is nothing to borrow, no account, no loan queue and no preview limit. Verified on
this server, 15 Sep 2026.
| Book | What it gives you | Open |
|---|---|---|
| The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS | 26 Academic teaching units, 8 full practice tests, complete answer key. All 8 Listening and 8 Reading papers are marked by this site | read · sit a paper |
| New Insight into IELTS — all four skills | The Cambridge teaching course, split by skill. Has a real text layer, so it is searchable in the reader | read |
| Collins for IELTS — Reading, Listening, Speaking, Writing, Vocabulary | Topic units with exam practice; the Reading and Listening tests are in the runner | library |
| Improve your IELTS — Reading, Writing, Listening & Speaking | Ten per-type Reading drill sets and ten Writing prompts, all in the runner | drills |
Read them here, not elsewhere. The reader keeps your place per book, jumps to a page, and sits beside the answer sheet in the companion runner — so the paper stays in the book and the site does the clock, the marking, the band and the error log. Twelve of the fourteen are scans with no text layer; use the contents page and the registry's page numbers rather than searching.
On the “free download” mirrors. Searching these titles surfaces Drive folders, Telegram channels and PDF-farm sites. Beyond the legal position there is a practical reason that matters more: those scans routinely ship without the audio, with wrong or missing answer keys, and with OCR damage in exactly the Reading passages you are being tested on. A corrupted answer key teaches you the wrong answer with full confidence. You already have clean copies — there is no reason to touch one.
My subscriptions
Courses you pay for and have asked to keep on the site. They sit behind a login, so nothing here is verified from this server; each entry records the link and how it fits the sprint. Treat a paid course as material, not the plan: a quiz there counts as a Block 5 technique drill, and any wrong answer goes into the error register so the priorities see it.