My Experience on Preparing for PTE Academic Exam

After postponing for a long time, today (2018-11-09) I finally sat for the PTE Academic English exam. As I did not spend enough time to prepare and practice for the exam, I do not expect that I will get a good score 😅. I will have to wait 5 more business days to see the exam results. Until then, I decided to record some of the things which can be helpful to other future test takers.

Planning

As I was postponing the preparation for this exam many times (as there were lot of other interesting tech stuff to learn than 'boring' English 😃), I decided to just schedule the exam without any preparation 😟. I scheduled the exam about 3 weeks ago, so I only had around 2 weekends + 3 more weekdays to prepare for the exam.
PTE official website itself has lots of valuable resources for you to prepare for the exam (See https://pearsonpte.com/preparation/ ). This website even provides free practice questions which you can download to your computer (See “Offline practice test” in https://pearsonpte.com/preparation/resources/  page). I downloaded the PTE test takers hand book and other such documents available from the official website. This website also has good introductions (including short videos) about each question type. Then I created a separate folder for each question type to store the resources related to that question type. This helped me to easily focus on each question type individually. Then I created a plan to prepare for the exam within the short time period available before the exam.
For PTE, there are two main areas you must focus.

•  English enabling skills (Grammar, Vocabulary, Pronunciation, etc)
• How to answer each question type

Preparation

Improving English Enabling Skills 

In addition to prepare for answering the questions, you must improve your core English enabling skills such as grammar, vocabulary (PTE exam focuses on academic related vocabulary), and pronunciation.
For grammar, I followed an online video course from Udemy website (by Anthony Kelleher). For vocabulary, I followed a pdf which contained "the top 400 words from PTE vocabulary". But I think my academic related vocabulary was already good due to the day-to-day work I do for my job and due to lot of reading I do, so you may have to spend more time to study more words targeted in PTE vocabulary.
For the pronunciation, I learned two techniques. First one is, to google whenever I find a word which I didn't know how to pronounce, and then click the "speaker"🔉 button in the Google 🔎 result page to listen how to pronounce it. The second technique was to use the Voice Recorder software available in Windows OS to record my own voice saying the specific word and then to listen to the recorded voice to compare it with actual expected pronunciation to identify whether I have to improve the pronunciation. You will be surprised to learn that although you thought you pronounce the word correctly in your mind, you pronounced it wrongly in reality (even some simple words). This second technique is very useful as it gives you immediate feedback to correct your pronunciation.

Preparing for Question Types

What I did first, was to re-order the question types by the complexity and difficulty, from most complex/difficult to least complex/easy. Then I could prioritize spending time on preparing and practicing the question types in the top of the list, and then go down the list. I identified that I actually did not have to prepare for some question types in the list, as those are very basic questions. I practiced answering those questions only during the mock tests.
"Write an essay" question type was on the top of my prioritized list, and the second one was "Describe an image" question type. Those were followed by "Re-tell a lecture", "Summarize Spoken Text", and "Summarize Written Text". From all of these prioritized question types, I struggled with "describe an image" question type the most.

Methods/Structures

To answer a question from each of these complex question types in PTE exam, it is not enough to have proper English enabling skills such as grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. It is essential to have a method, or a structure prepared beforehand for properly and quickly answer these questions within the given short time period. Fortunately, there are videos in YouTube that explain about these methods/structures by an excellent English PTE guru named Jay, from http://www.e2language.com website. I will list down links to these videos at the end of this post.

Practice

For practicing, I found some sample questions from different sources such as from Jay’s videos, from PTE website, and other online resources. As I did not have enough time left, I did not practice enough questions to make me feel fully confident. For example, I wrote only 3-5 essays before the PTE exam.
I also bought 2 scored mock tests from Pearson website (https://www.ptepractice.com/). Doing these scored mock tests was very useful to get ready for the actual exam.
Things to note: Although I had more than enough time when I did the mock exams, it seemed I was not careful with time during the real test. Therefore, I was not able to answer 1-2 questions in the first section. Also, it was little bit distracting due to the noise of the other test takers during the first section. From my overall experience during the preparation and facing the PTE exam, the most difficult question type for me was "Describe an image" question type. All other question types were manageable. It was very interesting experience (as this is my first non-tech exam after more than 10 years), but I am not exactly sure what will be the score. Let's hope for the best 🙏. [UPDATE: I received my PTE score report on next day. Score was better than I expected 😊]

Links

·        Question Type: “Write an essay”

o   PTE Writing Write Essay SUPER STRUCTURE  Sentence by Sentence with Jay! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_-u0fHQetQ

o   How to write a good essay Paraphrasing the question - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9aVjBHEEbU  

·        Question Type: “Describe an image”

o   PTE Speaking: Describe Image | SUPER METHOD! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rveo3RFK3kk

o   PTE ACADEMIC DESCRIBE IMAGE with RESPONSES - ULTIMATE COLLECTION !! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_PYMRyQCY

·        Question Type: “Re-tell a lecture”

o   PTE Speaking  Retell Lecture METHOD with Jay! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9iYnbHd5ys

·        Question Type: “Summarize Spoken Text”

o   PTE Listening: Summarize Spoken Text | METHOD with Jay!  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc86wI4v4rc

·        Question Type: “Summarize Written Text”

o   PTE Writing: Summarize Written Text | Learn the Proven Method! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdyRgrOEzx8

Kaizen Singapore CTF - My first CTF experience

Today (27 of Oct, 2018), I attended a CTF organized by Div0, Booz Allen Hamilton, and ICE71, based on Kaizen CTF platform of Booz Allen Hamilton. According to Booz Allen Hamilton, they had done similar events throughout the world using this platform. I got to know about this event through Div0's meetup page (https://www.meetup.com/div-zero/events/255394149/). Although I had heard about CTFs and was interested in participating CTFs for a quite some time, this was the first CTF I felt comfortable enough to attend. Main reasons were, it was a single player CTF and organizers had specially mentioned that this was a beginner friendly CTF which can be an ice breaker of CTFs. As I did not know any other colleagues who were interested and had security skills to form a CTF team, I was not able to attend CTFs which expect teams.

As I learned, there are two types of CTFs. One type is attacker-defender type CTFs, and the other type is jeopardy style CTFs. The CTF organized by Kaizen was a jeopardy style CTF.
The event started by hosting a lunch and networking session at around 1pm, and then after a quick introduction about rules and the platform, the CTF was started at around 3pm.
The time duration for the CTF was from 3pm to around 7pm. At 3pm, the Kaizen platform allowed us to access the CTF challenges. The CTF challenges were categorized under 'coding', 'reverse engineering', 'crypto', 'web', 'networking', and 'forensics'.

As we were instructed not to share the details of the CTF challenges, I will try to give information about the experience without leaking information about the challenges.
I started the first challenge in 'coding' category, although I understood what was the expected algorithm, due to lack of experience in developing expected kind of scripts, I did not continue to work on creating a script for this. I stopped it there and then started challenges in 'Web' category. From around 6-7 challenges in 'Web category, I completed 3. I also almost completed 2 more 'Web' challenges, but I was not able to continue those two at the last step. Then I moved to complete a challenge from each 'Forensics', 'Networking' categories, and 2 challenges from 'Crypto' category.

So I completed 7 challenges and almost completed around 3 more challenges. Although my score was not that high, I think it is a good score for a first time CTF. As I was afraid I would be stuck in rabbit holes, I moved away to other challenges when I felt I was stuck at one challenge for few minutes. I am not yet sure whether that is a good approach for CTFs, or whether I should try to complete high value single tasks taking more time. My strategy was trying to complete basic challenges of each category if I feel like I have the basic knowledge, then move to work on other advanced challenges in categories familiar to me, and to move to next one if I am stuck more than few minutes.

There were very valuable prizes prepared for the top 5 players in the leader board, including 2000 SGD worth training voucher for a security training such as OSCP/OSCE for the first place winner. The organizers had organized this event excellently and only complain I have is that room was too cold at the end. It would be great if there was hot coffee or tea there. Overall it was worthy learning experience and I would like to thank Div0, Booz Allen Hamilton, and ICE71 for their effort on organizing this event.