This research was to find out the problems faced and strategies used by students of English Education of Universitas Muhammmadiyah Yogyakarta (UMY) when they attempted listening section of IELTS test. There are two research questions in this research, (1) what are the problems faced by students in attempting listening section of the IELTS test and, (2) what are listening strategies used by students in EED UMY academic year 2012 when they attempt the listening section of IELTS test. The methodology in this study was qualitative research with purposive sampling. The setting of this study was at English Education of UMY, and there were six participants who had been interviewed. The data reported from the interviews were analyzed in three steps of coding: open, axial and selective coding. To answer the first research question, the data showed that there were eight problems which were affected by four factors, namely listeners, speakers, contents and environment factor. There were two problems came from speakers factor, accent and speech rate delivery. There were two problem affected by listeners factor, anxiety and multi-tasking abilities pertaining the question. There were three problems caused by contents, length of spoken text, unfamiliar vocabulary, and reduced forms. The last, there was only one problem caused by environment, namely noise. To answer second research question, there were 19 test taking strategies on listening section. The strategies were belonged to three majors’ strategies, metacognitive, cognitive and TWS. First, there were five strategies used by students which were classified into metacognitive strategy. Those strategies were direct attention, refocusing, selective listening, pre- listening strategies, and self-evaluation. Second, there were eight strategies used by students which were classified into cognitive strategy. Those were segmentation of cognitive bottom-up strategies, contextualization, note taking strategy of cognitive formal practicing strategies, questioning elaboration of cognitive top-down strategies, visualization, reconstruction strategy, listening for main idea of cognitive top-down strategies, and finding key word strategy. The last, there were six strategies which are classified into TWS. Those were deductive reasoning strategy, guessing strategy, error-avoidance, cue-using strategy, time-using strategy, and Intent consideration strategy. Those 19 nine strategies used by students to answer six question type in IELTS listening section. Most students also used difference strategies to face difference questions of listening section of IELTS test.