How it works

Six mechanics, and none of them is a video library.

Most prep sells you content and hopes you consume it. StudyPass measures where you are, decides what today should contain, marks what you produce, and tells you how far you still are from your band. Here is each piece, in the order you meet it.

01 · Choosing your band

You already know the number. It's on your offer letter.

We don't test you to decide what you're allowed to buy. A university asks for 6.5, or an employer asks for 7.0, and that requirement is a fact about your life, not something we should be adjudicating.

The safeguards are elsewhere, and they're better ones. Upgrading costs only the difference, so choosing too low costs you nothing but a later payment. Every bundle page lists the Listening and Reading marks out of 40 it aims at, so you can check the target against a score you've already had.

Aiming a long way up? We'll say so plainly rather than take the money quietly: "5.5 to 7.5 is realistically 5–7 months at 45 minutes a day." We warn, we don't block.

Taken a test before?

Skip ahead — but not out

Tell us your IELTS, TOEFL, Duolingo, PTE or Cambridge score and when you took it, and we'll say whether the band you've picked is a realistic 90 days away or a longer project.

What it will never do is decide anything for you. Your readiness score is measured on our questions, on work you did here. A previous score is advice about which rung to buy — never a verdict, and nothing is locked or unlocked by it.

Age of score	What we do with it
Under 6 months	Taken at face value when we suggest a rung
6 to 24 months	We suggest a rung one band lower than it says
Over 24 months	Kept on file for reference; we suggest nothing from it

02 · The daily plan

Not a syllabus. A queue of tasks for today.

Built from the band you bought, your test date and how your practice has actually been going: thirty to sixty minutes of specific work, one question per screen, thumb-reachable. It opens on a bus and it survives a bad signal.

Every week it rebalances against your readiness score. The skill closest to your next band gets more minutes; the ones already holding get fewer. You never have to decide what to study, which is the decision most people get wrong and most people quit over.

Your adherence percentage is on the home screen every day, not buried in a settings page. It is the honest measure of whether you are actually doing the work.

03 · Locked vocabulary

Words above your band stay blurred.

You can see that they exist. You can see which band unlocks them. You cannot study them yet, and that is the point — a 6.5 student who spends three weeks on Band 8 vocabulary has lost three weeks.

The blur says "not yet." It never says "pay up."

mitigate

Band 6.5 · Lexical Resource

ubiquitous

Band 6.5 · Lexical Resource

notwithstanding

Band 7.0 · Lexical Resource

Unlocks at Band 7.0

tantamount

Band 7.5 · Lexical Resource

Unlocks at Band 7.5

Every unlocked word carries a Mongolian gloss and the mistake Mongolian speakers usually make with it.

04 · Band-gated marking

You only get back the notes you can act on.

Your writing and speaking are scored against all four official criteria. But a 6.0 writer being told their cohesion lacks nuance learns nothing — they need to be told which sentences are broken. So the feedback is filtered to your band, and it widens as you climb.

Marking comes back in minutes, not days, and every correction explains three things: what's wrong, why a Mongolian speaker tends to make that particular mistake, and the fix. Both languages, every time.

Marking is included in every bundle, at the depth your band can act on. A 6.0 writer gets sentence accuracy; a 7.5 writer gets cohesion and idiom. Notes pitched above where you are do not help, so we don't send them.

05 · Readiness score

Distance to your band, never lessons watched.

It's built the way the examiner builds yours: four skills estimated separately, four criteria inside Writing and Speaking, then the real rounding rule applied on top. Not one blended number that means nothing.

And it reports the route, not just the score. "You're at 6.25, which rounds to 6.5. Your Reading is closest to 7 — four more correct answers gets you there."

Readiness

6.4

Target 6.5 · 24 days to test

LListening 6.5 — holding
RReading 6.5 — closest to 7
WWriting 6.0 — paragraphing is the gap
SSpeaking 6.0 — pronunciation is the cheapest lift

This is the screen students send to their parents.

06 · Exit exam

A bundle ends when you score, not when the content runs out.

To finish, you sit a full timed mock under exam conditions and score at your target band. That's the whole definition of done — no percentage, no completion bar, no certificate for showing up.

Pass it and you get a StudyPass Band Certificate: dated, shareable and verifiable. It isn't an IELTS result and we'd never pretend otherwise — it's proof that under exam conditions, on our test, you hit your band before you paid to sit the real one.

Deliberately absent

Three things we chose not to build

An open-ended chatbot

There is no free-form chat anywhere in StudyPass. You can already talk to a chatbot for nothing. What you can't get for nothing is a plan, a measurement and marking against the real criteria — so that's what we built instead.

Real IELTS past papers

Official practice tests and past papers are copyrighted, and we don't reproduce them. We build in the format — same question types, same timings, same traps — with our own material. Anyone selling you copied Cambridge papers is taking a risk on your behalf.

Content above your band

The obvious way to look generous is to give everyone everything. It's also the fastest way to make a 6.0 student quit. The ceiling is the product, and we'd rather explain that than quietly sell you volume you can't use.