IELTS Writing Task 2: what the examiner is actually marking

Most students I meet have written twenty essays and had none of them marked against the real criteria. They are getting better at writing essays and no better at passing the exam. Those are different skills.

Task 2 is marked on four criteria, each worth a quarter of the score:

1. Task Response — did you answer the question that was asked?
2. Coherence and Cohesion — can the examiner follow your argument?
3. Lexical Resource — vocabulary range and precision.
4. Grammatical Range and Accuracy.

Where the marks actually go

In my experience almost every essay stuck at 6.0 is losing them in the first two. The grammar is fine. The vocabulary is fine. The essay simply does not answer the question, or it answers a slightly different, easier question.

"To what extent do you agree?" is not an invitation to list advantages and disadvantages. If you list both and never say what you think, you have not responded to the task — and no amount of good grammar repairs that.

Three things to change this week

• Underline the task words before you plan. Discuss both views and give your own opinion asks for three things. Count them, then check your plan has three parts.
• Write the position sentence first. One sentence, in the introduction, that answers the question directly. Everything after it exists to support it.
• One idea per paragraph, stated in the first sentence. The examiner reads a lot of essays. Make the structure impossible to miss.

What "40 minutes" really means

Five minutes planning, thirty writing, five checking. The five minutes of checking are not optional: articles, plural endings and subject–verb agreement are the mistakes that cost marks in criterion four, and they are the easiest ones in the world to find on a re-read.

If you want your writing marked against these four criteria rather than against a vague sense of "good English", that is what a lesson with me looks like — take the level test and we will start from where you actually are.