6 Tips to Nail the OET Test
2023 has just started. Therefore, many of you will be looking to prepare for the OET exam. And if you are one of those, this blog post is for you.
Here, we’ll help you achieve the required score in the OET exam with the six easiest tips. This way, you will stay prepared for the OET exam, irrespective of whether you’re planning on taking the OET exam in a few weeks, months, or maybe even late this year.
Thus, without any further delay, let’s begin this discussion.
What Exactly Is OET?
OET stands for Occupational English Test. This test is an international language assessment exam for healthcare professionals. It aims to test the language proficiency of those healthcare professionals who want to work in countries like Australia, New Zealand, UAE, the USA, and the UK.
6 Tips to Ace the OET Exam
The Occupational English Test is pretty similar to IELTS, as it has four sub-tests (writing, speaking, reading, and listening). So, the following tips will help you ace all the sub-exams of OET.
1. Familiarize Yourself With the Test’s Content
You don’t want to stress yourself by trying to figure out what you need to do while taking the OET. Therefore, familiarizing yourself with the test’s content is the first tip of this guide.
The content of the OET exam reflects the circumstances and duties that healthcare personnel can experience in their day-to-day responsibilities. So, you may find the following things in the content of OET:
- Medical terminologies.
- Patient-related scenarios.
- Grammar and vocabulary assessment.
- Listening, reading, and communication assessment in a professional setting.
But let’s understand these points through two examples.
For the first example, we’ve taken a mock ‘reading’ test containing medical jargon. It aims to examine the reading ability of candidates in a professional setting.
Here is another example of a mock ‘speaking’ test that aims to check the communication of candidates with patients in a professional setting:
That’s how the content of the OET test will look. So, after looking at the above pictures, if you’ve immediately understood what you need to do and how you can find the information you need, you are in the right spot. But if that’s not the case, then you need practice.
Thus, getting access to various practice questions is the best way to train yourself to understand the test from top to bottom. This way, you can get started immediately instead of wasting time and figuring out what to do upon seeing a question. Even if you are already familiar with the test, finding and preparing the practice questions will still be essential to perform better.
But if you don’t know where to find valid practice questions, read tip number 2.
2. Get Help
Before taking the Occupational English Test, it is essential to find the people that can help you in the preparation. Therefore, tip number 2 for nailing the OET exam is to get help from experts.
There are different ways to get help regarding the Occupational English Test. For instance, you can contact a professional OET teacher or a friend who has taken the test and ask for preparation advice.
Similarly, you can also take assistance from the official website of OET and its social media handles (Facebook and YouTube) to get effective OET preparation data. Besides the official website, here are some of the famous and reliable OET preparation resources:
Note: If a website claims to offer 50 tests at a low price, the tests are unlikely to match the quality and difficulty of those used in an OET exam.
3. Build a Habit of Reading and Listening
Suppose you are in a situation where you’re not using the English language regularly. Such a situation can negatively impact your English skills. However, to prevent this, you can build a habit of reading and listen regularly. The best way to learn a language is to listen and read.
Building a habit of reading will improve your reading speed, vocabulary, grammar, and range. And this improvement will eventually prove helpful in the writing and speaking sections of OET. On the other hand, the habit of listening will help you emphasize words deliberately, which will eventually assist in making ideas clearer and more precise.
Thus, use the assistance of the following sources to build a strong habit of English listening and reading:
- You can read news and articles from Al Jazeera English because this platform has robust sections related to health, lifestyle, food, sports, science, etc. Doing so will expose you to a wide range of helpful language.
- Similarly, you can listen to podcasts or news radios with professional and clearest pronunciations. And when it comes to professional and clearest pronunciations on news radios or podcasts, there is none better than ABC and BBC. Doing so will help you learn the art of deliberately modeling sentence stress and intonations.
4. Improve Vocabulary
When taking the OET test, the writing part is where a lot of people can face difficulty. If you want to nail the writing section, you have to make sure that you have the right words and phrases up your sleeve.
In essence, you have to work on improving your vocabulary as part of the preparation routine. There are several different ways in which you can do that. For one, you can simply peruse an online thesaurus or a dictionary to find synonyms for words that you already know about. You can even start learning new ones and then try them out when speaking or writing anything.
Incidentally, using online AI tools is also a good way to introduce yourself to new words. Paraphrasers, in particular, can be handy in this situation.
Here is how this basically works.
You can enter some sample content into a paraphraser and then carefully read the output. Since paraphrasing tools synonymize the text, you will be able to see and learn new words.
Another benefit of using paraphrasers is that you get to understand the proper application and usage of the words. This is much better than knowing the meaning alone since you will have an idea of the places and instances where the new words can look suitable.
Before moving on to the next point, here is an example of how you can use a paraphrasing tool for sharpening your vocabulary. We’ll be using Prepostseo paraphrasing tool for this test since it is free and it works smartly:
As you can see, the tool changes several words and provide some suitable suggestion. This way you can improve your vocabulary by learning from the suggestion as it helps you in getting different ideas for the changed words.
5. Evaluate and Learn From Your Mistakes
When it comes to Occupational English Tests, learning from mistakes is one of the most important things. Therefore, the fifth tip in this guide is to evaluate yourself and learn from your mistakes.
This tip is valid for all parts (listening, reading, speaking, and writing) of the OET exam. So, if you make a mistake, don’t get upset. Instead, analyze your error to figure out why it happened and internalize the lesson. For instance, if the error is in a reading test, figure out why you’re wrong and understand why the correct answer is correct.
However, if you don’t know what your mistakes are, you can take assistance from a professional. So, if you analyze the errors in every mock test, you will eventually perform better in the next test.
6. Understand the Importance of Sleep Before OET
According to a study:
“Students who sleep better enjoy better grades, better recall, better mood, and better health. (Ryan, 2021)”
Therefore, to nail your OET exam, you must follow this last tip: relax and get appropriate rest before the test.
Sleep allows your brain to transfer memories from short-term to long-term memory. So, besides the actual preparation, you must take proper sleep and rest to perform better in the OET exam.
Conclusion
When it comes to the Occupational English Test, people often ask about the appropriate time to prepare for the OET exam. So, the time duration of 25-30 days (before the test day) is enough to prepare for the OET exam.
Hence, once you’ve booked the date for your OET exam, you should go for it. That’s because OET is not a test for your medical proficiency. Instead, OET is about testing your confidence, time management, and concentration.
Thus, with the above-discussed tips in mind, proper practice, and the ability to manage your time effectively, you can easily nail your OET exam.
APA References
Ryan, T. (2021, August 29, 2022). A Study Guide To Getting Sleep During Final Exams. SLEEP FOUNDATION. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/school-and-sleep/final-exams-and-sleep
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