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I do not recommend joining illume
I joined Illume in Secondary 4 hoping to improve my English vocabulary for Paper 1 and sharpen my answering techniques for Paper 2. Unfortunately, after one full year, I feel that the programme did not help me at all, and I consider the lessons to be a waste of my time and money.
Although we technically went through answering techniques for certain comprehension question types, we would only attempt about 5–6 questions each lesson—and even then, my teacher often could not finish going through all of them despite each lesson being 2 hours long. I cannot understand how 5–6 questions could take an entire lesson.
Before signing up, I asked the counter staff whether there would be composition and situational writing practice. After attending for one year, I can confidently say I have never written a full composition with Illume. Whenever we did write compositions, it was always zooming into specific sections, which I didn’t mind at first, but it became very unproductive.
Many lessons were spent writing only one introduction or one body paragraph, and that alone would take up the entire 2-hour lesson. This was an utter waste of time because I could have easily written two full compositions on my own in the same amount of time. The slow pace made the lessons feel pointless and did nothing to help me improve my writing.
On top of that, before writing any composition or situational writing, the teacher would repeatedly go through the same set of notes about question types every single time, even though they were self-explanatory. This took up even more time and did not help at all. My vocabulary did not improve, and my composition and situational writing skills remained exactly the same after so many lessons.
There was also a last-minute 4-hour Sec 4 lesson right before the O-Level English exam, and the teacher once again went through the exact same 2024 O-Level paper. I don’t see the point of repeatedly going through past-year papers that are not going to appear again. Over the whole year, I did less than 10 full Paper 2s with Illume. I expected a tuition centre to provide additional, higher-quality practice on top of what my school already does, but instead, I found myself going through the same O-Level papers that my school teachers had already covered long before Illume did.
To make things worse, some of the answers given by Illume for the O-Level papers were different or incorrect when compared to the suggested answers provided by my school teachers. I also remember an entire 2-hour lesson used just for listening comprehension, which felt like a complete waste of time considering how expensive Illume’s fees are.
Illume also has an “Illume Akademi AI” portal that supposedly helps improve composition and situational writing. We are told to type out our full compositions so the AI can generate a corrected version. In reality, the system is time-consuming and not useful at all. Because of this AI portal, teachers stopped marking our work properly, which made the whole situation even more disappointing.
I know one year is a relatively short runway, but even so, I did not see any improvement in my English. I honestly feel that I wasted a year’s worth of time and money. Based on my experience with my teacher, Ms Toong, I do not recommend joining Illume, especially considering the high tuition fees. I expected much more.
Date of experience: 23 October, 2025
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