Are the Cambridge IELTS books still the best practice material?

For Listening and Reading difficulty calibration, yes. They are past official material and the closest public benchmark to real exam difficulty. Use them sparingly under strict conditions as measuring instruments, and save at least two full tests for your final fortnight.

Which Cambridge IELTS book should I start with?

Work backwards from the most recent volumes, which best reflect current question style, and keep the newest ones unopened for the final two weeks. Older volumes are still useful for drilling but are less representative of today's phrasing.

How much IELTS practice material do I actually need?

Less than you think for Listening and Reading, and more than most people use for Writing and Speaking. A large question bank for daily drilling, a handful of official tests for calibration, and fifteen or so properly marked essays and recordings covers a typical four-week preparation.

Are Band 9 model essays useful?

Only if you use them actively. Reading them teaches little. Comparing one against your own essay on the same prompt, identifying the specific differences in development and language, then rewriting yours, is where the value is.

Practice 8 min read· August 2026

The best IELTS practice material, and the order to use it in

Cambridge books, official samples, question banks and AI feedback each do one job well. Here is what each is for and the sequence that stops you wasting them.

There is more IELTS material available than anyone could work through in a year, and most candidates use it in the worst possible order: they burn the highest-quality resource first, casually, then spend the final fortnight on whatever is left.

Every resource type does one job well. Here is what each is for, and the sequence that gets the most out of all of them.

The Cambridge IELTS books: your calibration standard

The Cambridge IELTS series is past official material, and its Listening and Reading tests are the closest thing to a real difficulty benchmark that exists publicly. That makes them precious and easy to waste.

Use them as measuring instruments, not as daily practice. Each full test you sit under strict conditions gives you a trustworthy band reading. Each one you half-do on a Sunday afternoon with the answers open is gone forever, and you cannot un-see the answers. Work through them from the most recent volumes backwards, since they best reflect current question style, and keep at least two unopened for the final fortnight.

Official free samples: start here

The British Council, IDP and Cambridge publish free official sample tests. They are the first thing you should do, before you buy or subscribe to anything, because they tell you where you actually stand and therefore what to spend money on. Doing this properly in week one changes the entire shape of a preparation plan.

Question banks: your daily volume

A large question bank is for drilling, and drilling is what fixes the specific types you lose marks on. This is the material you use most days: thirty Matching Headings questions in a row, twenty Task 1 charts, fifty Listening form-completion gaps.

Quality varies enormously here, and the checks are quick: does Academic Task 1 include the actual chart, do answer keys explain why, does Listening use varied accents, are Reading passages clean rather than scraped. Poor question banks teach wrong patterns, which is worse than doing nothing.

Marked Writing and Speaking: the part that changes bands

Everything above marks itself against a key or does not need marking. Writing and Speaking do, and this is the one category of material most study plans under-buy.

You need volume here, not perfection: fifteen scored essays with per-criterion feedback will move your Writing band further than three teacher-marked ones, because improvement comes from spotting your repeated pattern and killing it, and a pattern needs several data points to become visible.

The band descriptors: free, and the most under-read document in IELTS

The official Writing and Speaking band descriptors are published in full. Read the descriptor for your current band and the one above, in each criterion. It takes twenty minutes and it is the clearest instruction you will ever get about what to change.

Almost nobody does this. It is the single highest ratio of value to effort in the whole preparation.

What to skip

"Leaked" or "real exam" question sets. They are fabricated, often wrong, and they train bad habits.
Band 9 model essays you read but never write. Reading a model essay teaches you almost nothing; rewriting your own essay to reach it teaches you a lot.
Vocabulary lists of 500 academic words. Learn words in phrases, in context, and use them in marked writing, or they never reach your active vocabulary.
Long video courses watched passively. Four hours of video is four hours you did not spend producing English that somebody marked.

The order, in one paragraph

Week 1: free official samples to find your baseline, plus the band descriptors. Weeks 2 to 3: question bank drilling on your weak types every day, marked Writing and Speaking two or three times a week, one Cambridge test mid-way as a calibration check. Week 4: two full mocks under strict conditions from your saved Cambridge material, targeted drilling on whatever they expose, and light revision only in the final two days.

The principle: cheap, unlimited material for volume; scarce, official material for measurement; marked practice for the two skills that decide your band.

Volume, drills and scoring in one place

IELTSVega covers the daily-volume and marked-practice parts of that plan: 15,000+ Academic and General Training questions drillable by individual question type, full timed mock tests in a computer-delivered interface, and instant AI band scores on Writing and Speaking against all four official criteria. Keep your Cambridge books for calibration and use them last.