Posted on: Thu 01-07-2021

Nurses who make up the highest percentage population of Nigerians who attempt the IELTS have taken to social media to recount woes and frustration they have suffered at the hands of IELTS exams administrators in their quest for greener pastures.

According to Nurse Jude Chiedu, IELTS feeds off that strong drive to escape poverty and poor remuneration and this is what makes Nurses pay any cost on the way to the golden gate to seek better life, education, and job opportunities in foreign lands. He bemoaned the fact that Nigerians are at the mercy of the exams organizer who decide what scores to issue applicants without recourse to external scrutiny or final vetting from any external regulatory body. Jude queried the fact that even if one felt aggrieved by his or her score and asked for a remark, it comes at an extra cost and with no refund if the initial assessment scores did not change with the reevaluation. He also decried the recurrent extortion in terms of increase in cost of writing the exams noting that the Academic version has increased by over 90percent in the last three years to about 79,000naira today. This according to him isn’t commensurate for an exam that barely lasts 5 hours.

Nurse Adiodun (Name changed to protect her from victimization) called on the IDP IELTS to stop failing people intentionally. He recalled the emotional and psychological roller coaster ride they put him through when he patronized their services. According to him, he took the speaking module via zoom and had obvious network issues. IDP went ahead to assess and score him irrespective of the obvious internet connection problems on the day of the exams. He applied for remark immediately and after being put through a harrowing three weeks wait, IDP acknowledged it was wrong for them to grade him amid the bad internet network. The organizers annulled and withheld his TRF and forced him to rebook and re-sit the entire exams again from scratch albeit free. Hear him: I did the re-sit exam which was more like a walk in the park and was expecting an 8point based on my performance. But these people did not mark my exam and just gave me random scores. I felt devastated

Nurse Alex opined that the test is an ‘international English language testing system’ not ‘international accent identification testing system’, Alex questioned why people must take the listening test spoken with an accent. Why can’t we both (examiner and i) sit on a zoom call and talk, if we understand ourselves in terms of listening and feedback responses, then I am obviously good at speaking and listening.  

The Nurses unanimously called on the government to regulate and supervise the activities of the IELTS exam organizers as they have now metamorphosed into a purely revenue generating institution fleecing Nigerians of their hard-earned money.

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