Ran into this with almost every student I've coached: you study for 4-6 weeks, jump a full band, feel unstoppable... then you plateau hard for the next month and can't figure out why.

Here's what's actually happening: early gains come from fixing obvious stuff — vocabulary gaps, unfamiliar question formats, basic timing. That's the easy 20%. The plateau hits because the remaining gains require task-specific skill (e.g. paraphrasing under time pressure in Writing Task 2, or catching signposting language in Listening Section 4) — and generic practice tests don't isolate those skills, they just re-test what you already know you're bad at.

What actually moves the needle past the plateau:

• Stop taking full practice tests every day. One per week is enough — the rest of the time should be drilling the specific sub-skill that's capping your score.

• Record yourself for Speaking and transcribe it. You will hear filler words and repeated structures you don't notice in the moment.

• For Writing, get actual human feedback on band-specific criteria (coherence/cohesion and lexical resource are where most people leak points, not grammar).

If you're stuck at the same band for 3+ weeks, it's not a motivation problem — it's a diagnosis problem. Figure out which of the four skills is actually capping you before you burn another month on generic prep.

Happy to answer questions on any of the three tests below.