The IELTS scores are 1-9. It's used to assess students for UK Universities. You need 5.5 for a Bachelor and 7 for a Masters in the UK. 4 - 4.5 is comparable to B1 level. 5.5 is B2 and 7 C1. I was also doing an IELTS course a few years back and what I thought is that everything had to be done very quickly. It's a time problem rather than an English problem. You need to process so much material in a short time. So you need to practice to skim loads of text quickly, just underlining the main words and being able to find the few points which answer the following questions quickly. It's kind of an academic skill, as they argue that students need to be able to read a lot in a short time, without understanding every word. In the listening I thought the difficulty was that they used many different accents, such as Scottish and Irish which are not that easy to understand, especially under time pressure.

I believe the scores are based on 0-5, so the closer to a five, the better

Hi, Megan! You are doing great job studying on your own! In IELT 4 means that you`ve got basic knowledge of language but you`ve got problems with more complicated language structures. 3 means that you are good at standard situations So,you are just in the middle of the way! Keep on doing!