Two students, Omar and Kate, discussing their project on how
IELTS Listening — IELTS Practice Originals, Listening Practice Test 5, Section 3
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{# Shown in full, as the review screen does after a sitting: it is the text a searcher is looking for, and hiding it would leave this page with nothing on it but a heading. #}Section 3. You will hear two students, Omar and Kate, discussing their project on how part-time jobs affect students' studies with their tutor. First, you have some time to look at questions 21 to 26.
Now listen carefully and answer questions 21 to 26.
TUTOR: Omar, Kate, your project on part-time jobs and grades. You were handling some sensitive data, how did you deal with that?
KATE: Very carefully indeed. What we really wanted was students' actual, official grades, but the university refused to release them, quite rightly, on privacy grounds, it wasn't about the cost or the time, they simply won't hand over individuals' records. So instead we asked students to report their own average grade themselves, anonymously.
OMAR: And to protect people properly, we made sure nobody could ever be identified, we didn't record names, or courses, or anything else that might single a person out.
TUTOR: Good ethical practice. But self-reported grades, isn't that a real weakness? People round up.
OMAR: They can, yes, so we built in a check. Rather than just trusting the figures, or asking the tutors to verify them, we compared the average grade our respondents reported against the university's published overall average, and the two matched very closely, which gave us real confidence people had been honest.
TUTOR: A neat validity check. Now, your strongest finding?
KATE: The big message was that it isn't simply whether you have a job that matters, nor really what kind of job it is, it's the number of hours. That was the key variable.
TUTOR: And did the type of job make a difference, shop versus office, on campus versus off?
OMAR: Far less than we'd expected, honestly. Across all those different kinds of work the effect was much the same, it was the hours that drove everything, not the nature of the job.
TUTOR: And a small amount of work, just a few hours a week?
KATE: That genuinely surprised us. A little part-time work didn't harm grades at all, if anything it seemed to help slightly, the students with a few hours actually did a touch better than those with none.
TUTOR: Fascinating. Now, you split the students into four groups by their weekly hours. Remind me of each. Those doing no paid work at all?
Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 27 to 30.
KATE: They did perfectly well, but, interestingly, they weren't the very best.
TUTOR: The ones doing under ten hours?
OMAR: They came out on top, the highest average grade of all four groups.
TUTOR: Ten to twenty hours?
KATE: Roughly average, holding steady, no real harm showing at that level.
TUTOR: And over twenty hours a week?
OMAR: That's where it fell apart, their grades clearly dropped, and you could see those students were really struggling.
TUTOR: A very clear pattern. Well done, both of you.
That is the end of Section 3. You now have some time to check your answers.