The official rule is one blunt sentence:
"You should be careful when writing your answers on the answer sheet because you will lose marks for incorrect spelling and grammar." — ielts.org, Academic test format in detail
No partial credit, no benefit of the doubt. You heard the word, you understood the word, you wrote one letter of it wrong — the mark is gone, and it counts exactly the same as a question you never understood at all. Each correct answer receives 1 mark (ielts.org), out of 40, and on the indicative conversion ielts.org publishes, 30 of those marks is Band 7. A handful of spelling and number slips is the visible difference between bands.
Here is the part most preparation misses: catching a spelled-out surname or a price is not really a listening-comprehension skill. It is transcription under time pressure — a mechanical skill — and almost nobody practises it as one. People do practice tests, mark themselves, sigh at the spelling errors, and move on. The errors are treated as bad luck. They are not luck. They are an untrained skill, and mechanical skills respond to drilling faster than anything else in this test — a week of ten-minute sessions is genuinely enough to change your error rate. That claim is coaching, not an official statistic — but the rule it responds to is quoted above, in black and white.
The failure
The failure has a shape. In Parts 1 and 2 — which ielts.org says "deal with everyday, social situations", with Part 1 being "a conversation between two speakers... for example, a conversation about travel arrangements" — the answers are disproportionately names, numbers, dates, prices and addresses. You hear the answer clearly. Then one of four things happens:
- You write the wrong homophone of a number pair — thirteen for thirty.
- You drop or double a letter in a spelled-out name.
- You write down the first number you hear when the speaker corrects themselves to a second.
- You write the singular when the recording said the plural — and one letter costs the mark.
And you get no second chance, because the official pages are equally blunt about that:
"You will hear the recordings once only." — ielts.org, Academic Listening format
There is one more law sitting on top of the spelling rule. Completion questions carry an instruction like this:
"A word limit is given, for example, 'NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER'."
and ielts.org's Reading question-type descriptions state the penalty outright: "You will lose the mark for writing more than the word limit." So a correct, correctly spelled answer wrapped in extra words dies too. Right word, right letters, right count — all three, or nothing.
The pairs that do the damage
This section is coaching — IELTS publishes no list of confusable sounds — but these are the classic collisions:
| You hear | Easily written as | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 13 / 30, 14 / 40 ... 19 / 90 | each other | -teen carries stress late; -ty swallows it |
| A / E / I | each other | the letter names blur at speed, and accents shift them |
| G / J | each other | near-identical letter names |
| M / N | each other | one nasal, heard through headphones |
| double letters ("double L") | a single letter | "double" is easy to miss mid-spelling |
| 15p vs £15, .50 vs 15 | each other | currency and decimals said fast |
Remember the accents line: ielts.org says "Different accents, including British, Australian, New Zealand and North American, are used" — so a letter name you can catch in one accent may surprise you in another. Drill against varied voices, not one.
A five-item drill (original — not from any real test)
Have someone read each line aloud once, at natural speed, or record yourself and play it back a day later. Write the answer. The trap is named after each item — don't peek first.
- "The booking's under my colleague's name — Kerrigan. That's K-E-double R-I-G-A-N." Trap: the double letter. Answer: Kerrigan. "Kerigan" scores zero.
- "The standard entry fee is £12.50, but as you're booking online it'll just be £9.80." Trap: two prices, one final. Answer: £9.80. The first number is bait — the correction is the answer.
- "So we'll deliver on the third of October — that's Friday October the 3rd, in the morning." Trap: the date said two ways. Answer: 3 October (or October 3). Two phrasings, one date — writing both, or adding "Friday morning", can break a word limit.
- "Send it to the depot — the postcode is G-U-1-6, then 7-H-F." Trap: the letter/number mix. Answer: GU16 7HF. G/J and the mid-string switch from letters to digits are where this dies.
- "You'll need to bring your own padlocks — the lockers don't come with them." Trap: the plural. Answer: padlocks. Writing padlock is a spelling-level miss — one letter, whole mark.
How to self-drill (coaching)
The record-and-transcribe method. Ten minutes a day:
- Write five items like the ones above — a name, a price with a correction, a date, a code, a plural. Record yourself reading them once, naturally, no slowing down.
- The next day, play the recording once and transcribe. Once-only is the whole point — the test gives no replay, so the drill must not either.
- Mark yourself to the official standard: any wrong letter, wrong number or extra word is zero.
- Log which trap caught you. After a week the log tells you exactly what to drill next.
Any audio in English works for the number pairs — podcasts, announcements — pause, write the number, check.
What is not official here
- There is no official list of "commonly tested words" or spellings. Nothing in the official format pages publishes one. Any book or site selling "the 100 words IELTS tests" made the list up — it may be sensible guesswork, but it is guesswork.
- The confusion-pair table and the drill method above are coaching, built to fit the quoted rules — they are ours, not IELTS's.
- Official pages do not say how many Part 1 answers are names or numbers. The quoted "everyday, social situations" wording is as far as officialdom goes.
What actually costs you
- One wrong letter = zero. The official line is "you will lose marks for incorrect spelling and grammar" — there is no partial credit.
- Extra words: "You will lose the mark for writing more than the word limit."
- Writing the first number when the speaker corrects to a second.
- Singulars for plurals — a one-letter, one-mark error.
- Practising with replays. "You will hear the recordings once only" — drill that way.
Try one
[Try a Listening task →] — one full task, marked, no card required.