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Yes, practice is a key for sure - but only on one condition. This is that you practice your listening skills. For me it isn't enough just to do one test after another as more quantity doesn't necessarily lead to more quality. What can happen is that you end up making the same mistakes.
My personal advice is actually not to practice too much. I suggest you practice less - no more than once or twice a week. This will put pressure on you to get it right and make you concentrate. The pressure is that you know that it will be at least a couple of days until you can do this again. That's the same sort of pressure you get in the exam.
Here are a few of my specific listening tips.
1. Make sure you can spell. Curiously, spelling matters rather more in the listening than the writing - if you spell it wrong: no mark.
2. Practice your shorthand. One difficulty in the listening is that you are doing 4 things at once: listening, reading (the question), writing (your answer) and of course thinking. The tip is to write only enough as you are listening and then to write it out in full in the 10 minutes at the end.
3. Look at 2 questions at once. It's not too much of a problem to get one question wrong. The real problem is to miss out on 2/3/4 consecutive questions. This can happen if you are still looking at question 4, but the tape has moved onto question 6.
4. Try to use the time between listenings to predict what sort of answers youa re looking for. Is it a number? Is it a name? etc
5. This is the BIG one and the one that causes easily the most problems. READ THE QUESTION. Sorry for the capital letters, but in my experience a huge proportion of mistakes are made not because you don't hear and understand what is said, rather you don't match what you hear with what the question asks you to do.
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