How IELTS Writing Is Marked: The Four Criteria and How They Combine

Listening and Reading are marked against an answer key. Writing is not. A certificated IELTS examiner reads your two pieces of writing and awards marks against four published assessment criteria, task by task. If you understand what those criteria reward, you can read your own writing the way the examiner will.

Two tasks, unequal weight

The Writing test gives you two tasks in 60 minutes. Task 1 asks for at least 150 words: on Academic you describe or summarise visual information such as a graph, table, diagram, or process; on General Training you write a letter. Task 2 asks for at least 250 words of discursive essay on both tests.

The two do not count equally. IELTS states that Task 2 contributes twice as much as Task 1 to your Writing score, which is why the suggested timing gives Task 2 forty of the sixty minutes. Splitting your time evenly means overinvesting in the task worth half as much.

The four criteria

Each task is assessed on four criteria, weighted equally within the task, a quarter each.

Task achievement (Task 1) and task response (Task 2) measure whether you did the job the question set. For Task 1 that means covering the requirements of the prompt and selecting and reporting its main features. For Task 2 it means answering every part of the question, holding a clear position, and developing your ideas rather than listing them. This is the criterion that careless question reading destroys, and no level of English rescues it.

Coherence and cohesion measures organisation: paragraphing that follows the logic of your answer, a progression the reader can follow, and linking that does its work without drawing attention to itself. A dependable essay structure feeds this criterion directly, which is why structure is such cheap improvement. We show one that works in How to Structure IELTS Writing Task 2 for a Band 7+.

Lexical resource measures vocabulary, and precision counts for more than rarity. The public descriptors reward less common vocabulary only when it is used accurately and naturally, and they track spelling and word formation errors at every band. A rare word used wrongly counts against you where a plain word used correctly would not.

Grammatical range and accuracy measures two things at once: the variety of structures you attempt, and how often errors appear and how much they interfere. Writing only simple sentences caps the range half of the criterion however error free they are; writing ambitious sentences full of errors caps the accuracy half. The bands reward controlled variety.

Each criterion gets its own detailed guide in this cluster: task response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy.

How the numbers combine

The examiner awards a band for each criterion on each task, and the four are averaged to score the task. Task 2 then counts twice. With Task 1 at band 6 and Task 2 at band 7, the weighted combination is (6 + 7 + 7) ÷ 3, which is 6.67 before rounding to the reported half band scale. Reverse the two performances and the same abilities produce 6.33. That arithmetic is the reason to respect the forty minute suggestion for Task 2.

Your Writing band then joins the other three sections in the overall average, rounded to the nearest half band, where averages ending in .25 round up to the next half band and .75 up to the next whole band. The band score calculator shows how a Writing band moves your overall score, and IELTS band scores explained covers the scale itself.

Read the descriptors themselves

You do not have to guess what a band 7 requires. IELTS publishes public versions of the Writing band descriptors on ielts.org, one table per task, describing every criterion at every band. They are dense, but one exercise repays the effort: read the row for your target band next to the row below it and note what actually changes. In coherence and cohesion, for example, band 6 tolerates linking that is mechanical, while band 7 expects a range of linking devices used flexibly, with some inaccuracies or some overuse or underuse. That difference is specific enough to practise against.

Because Writing is examiner marked, there is no conversion table to memorise and no raw score to count. The criteria are the whole game. Practise with the descriptor tables open, and have your writing assessed against them rather than by feel.