How IELTS Writing is scored

Your Writing band is not one judgement. It is four separate scores, averaged — and knowing which of the four is dragging you down is the difference between useful practice and guesswork.

Four criteria, equally weighted

Every essay is marked against four criteria, each worth a quarter of the score for that task:

• Task Achievement (Task 1) or Task Response (Task 2) — did you actually do what the question asked, cover everything required, and support it?
• Coherence and Cohesion — is it organised, does it progress logically, and do the linking words do real work?
• Lexical Resource — range and precision of vocabulary, including collocation and repetition.
• Grammatical Range and Accuracy — variety of structures, and how often errors appear.

Because they are equal, a band 8 in vocabulary cannot rescue a band 5 in grammar. It averages to 6.5.

Task 2 is worth twice Task 1

The two tasks are marked separately, then combined with Task 2 weighted double. In effect your Writing band is roughly one third Task 1 and two thirds Task 2.

That has a practical consequence people routinely get wrong. If you are short of time, finishing Task 2 properly matters more than polishing Task 1 — and if you only have the energy to practise one of them, practise Task 2.

How the rounding works

Criterion scores are whole or half bands. The four are averaged, and the result is rounded to the nearest half band, with quarters rounding up:

This rounding is why half a band on one criterion sometimes moves your whole result and sometimes changes nothing. If you average exactly 6.5, lifting one criterion by half a band gives 6.625, which still reports as 6.5. Lifting two gives 6.75, which reports as 7.0. Knowing which two is the whole game.

What examiners are not doing

They are not counting errors and subtracting. They are matching your writing to the descriptor that fits it best overall. One awkward sentence in otherwise strong writing costs very little; a repeated pattern costs a band, because patterns are what the descriptors describe.

Which is why "I made 12 mistakes" is far less useful than "I made the same article mistake 12 times". The second is one fixable habit.