Who marks the IELTS Speaking test?

The person sitting opposite you is doing two jobs at once. They are running a standardised interview to a fixed frame, and they are assessing you against four criteria while they do it. Knowing what stands behind that person changes how you read the room — and lowers the temptation to treat the examiner as someone who can be charmed.

What it takes to get into that chair

Test centres recruit and train their own examiners, and the entry requirements are specific: an undergraduate degree or equivalent, a TEFL or TESOL qualification, and three to five years of teaching experience. Applicants are then interviewed, trained by a qualified examiner trainer, and have to be approved by that trainer before they assess a single candidate.

So the examiner is an experienced English language teacher who has been trained to apply one particular rating scale. They are not marking to personal taste, and they are not comparing you to the last candidate.

The checks that sit behind your marks

Marking does not stop at the examiner. Every test is assessed by qualified examiners who undergo training and continuous monitoring, and selected results are marked twice so that a band means the same thing in one country as in another.

This is the part candidates rarely picture. Your interview is recorded, which means an examiner’s ratings can be reviewed against what you actually said. An examiner whose marking drifts is visible to the system, which is precisely why the outcome does not hinge on whether they seemed to like you.

Who assesses the other three papers

The same page describes one system for the whole test: every test is assessed by qualified examiners who undergo training and continuous monitoring, and selected results are marked twice. What differs is what there is to assess. IELTS.org’s scoring page says that in Listening and Reading each correct answer is awarded one mark and the score out of 40 is converted to the nine-band scale, so there is a key and no judgement of style. In Writing, examiners use the assessment criteria to award a score for each of four criteria, as they do in Speaking: Task Achievement or Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. The guide to the Writing test sets out those criteria, and how IELTS Speaking is scored covers the Speaking four.

What this means for how you behave in the room

Two practical consequences follow.

First, there is no benefit in trying to build rapport instead of speaking. Friendliness is not on the criteria list, and a warm exchange in which you say very little gives the examiner less language to rate, not more. Answer the question asked, then extend it.

Second, an examiner interrupting you is procedural, not personal. Each part is timed, and stopping you at the end of Part 2 is what the frame requires. Reading it as disapproval and shrinking your later answers is a genuine, avoidable way to lose marks.

Practising against the same standard

What the Speaking examiner is listening for is the four criteria, defined in what are the IELTS Speaking criteria. Because the marking is descriptor-based rather than impressionistic, you can rehearse against it. Score your own recordings criterion by criterion using the published wording, or use a tool that does the same — IELTS Mentor AI marks a spoken answer on those four criteria and returns a range rather than a single number, which is closer to how a borderline performance actually behaves in the hands of a stricter or more lenient examiner.

What you cannot rehearse is the examiner’s personality, and you do not need to. The system is built so that it does not matter.