Internet is filled with experts of every type! Name any topic and you will find people who claim to know the dark secrets and inside information related to it. They will tell you they know the shortcuts and the tips and tricks that no one else knows.
PTE is no different! In fact, here you will even find people who will promise to tell you the questions you might get in your real exam. They have something called a real exam question bank! A bank of questions they have collected from real sources!
How authentic is this, and can these question banks be really helpful?
Our straightforward answer is that they can be useful as an aid for preparation, but if you depend entirely on a question bank to fetch you the score quickly, you are probably setting yourself up for disappointment.
Letโs give you an example:
Assume that someone has told you all the describe image questions that have appeared in PTE exams worldwide in the last three months and are expected to repeat in the next three months. They might even give you the perfect written answer for these questions. But what about the many other parameters on which the score is calculated? What about your pronunciation and fluency? Unless you can speak well, even if you speak the correct answer, you will only receive a low score!
So, you see the problem there? You had the question bank and knew all the questions but still failed!
And this is just one problem with these question banks. Most of the question banks sold on the Internet are PDF or Word files which have randomly written questions, often incomplete, and without proper answers. Itโs like someone telling you there will be a summarize spoken text question related to American economy! What can you do with such information? Not much!
Not to mention, you canโt really do practice with PDFs! Unless the question is delivered in a test software you are just reading random files and filling your head with nonsense.
Stay away from all such scams!
Having said that, the real question banks still have a role to play and can be a score booster when used in the right way. At PTE Study Hub, we have questions reported by our students which we then add to our question bank. But we ask our students to treat these questions like another practice resource. Our teachers make sure these questions are complete in every sense, and then they add a high scoring sample response to it.
Practicing with these helps the test taker become familiar with the latest topics and types of questions asked in the exam. If the test taker has written an essay on the advantages and disadvantages of life in a big city, it stands to reason he will find it easy to write an essay on the advantages and disadvantages of life in a small town, or an essay on the traffic problem in big cities.
If the test taker treats the question like a regular practice resource, he will be learning from it. If he just tries to memorize, he will only get unexpected results.
Therefore, if you get a genuine real exam questions bank, make use of it in the right way. But do not ignore the fundamentals!