Keenu Students Improve IELTS Speaking by 1 Band Score
- Francis Carlisle
- Jun 3
- 2 min read
We’ve crunched the numbers… and by jove, they are crunchy!
Here at Keenu (Unlimited, personalised IELTS exam prep), we’ve been live in language schools in the UK & Ireland since October 2025.
And, like any good teacher, we’ve been tracking student performance across that time.
We always thought that students’ IELTS speaking scores would benefit from doing regular, realistic exam practice, and getting immediate, detailed, and individual feedback.
That’s why we built Keenu (well, plus I was tired of my IELTS students asking me for 1-1 time and I wanted AI to do the job for me!)
But we couldn’t prove that Keenu IELTS was actually affecting IELTS performance… until now.
Our data analysis divided IELTS students into 3 groups
Students who took
1-2 mock tests on Keenu per week, aka ‘light users’
3-7 mock tests per week, aka ‘medium users’
8 or more mock tests per week, aka ‘heavy users’
These were randomly selected students from a broad range of linguistic & cultural backgrounds.
The only things they have in common are a) they are studying UK or Irish language schools, and b) they plan to take an IELTS exam.
We tracked mock IELTS Speaking scores across a period of 8 weeks, and the results were pretty striking
A quick Rory Stewart-style explainer here - IELTS is scored from Band 0 (complete silence/blank page) to Band 9 (Stephen Fry).
Most students score between Band 5 and Band 7.5 - which sounds like a small range, but is actually a huge gulf in competency. And most universities require international students to get a score of 6.5 or higher in order to enrol.
We found that...
Light users of Keenu saw their average IELTS speaking mock test score rise by 0.19. (So an IELTS Band 6 becomes an IELTS Band 6.19)
Medium users rose by 0.47.
And heavy users… well, they rose by a whopping 1.17 (So an IELTS Band 6 becomes a Band 7.17 with heavy use of Keenu).
That’s the difference between a student being able to study abroad, or not. Being able to get a visa, or not. Getting an English-speaking job, or not.
It proves what rich parents have always known: 1-1 attention really makes the difference in learning (that’s why they’ve always paid for extra 1-1 tuition - right back to Alexander the Great & Aristotle).
But in an AI-world, 1-1 practice & feedback is no longer the exclusive right of the privileged few. The doors have been flung open.
So if you’re teaching IELTS and you want your students to have extra 1-1 practice & feedback, click here to get started with our 14-day free trial.
