IELTS Band Descriptors

The band descriptors are the guidelines the examiner uses to give you a band when she/he is assessing your writing or speaking test. For a full overview of the band descriptors for IELTS speaking, IELTS writing task 1 and IELTS writing task 2 just follow the links. We used the word assess here, as the examiner does not correct your task, she/he does not provide you with any feedback on what you did wrong, nor does she suggest any ideas for improvement. All you get is a score from 0 to the maximum 9.

So, when the examiner gets your writing he/she reads it with the 4 band descriptors next to it and compares your writing with the band descriptors. This means that the examiner moves from the bottom to the top and looks for the description which fits most closely to your writing or speaking test.

For the Writing tasks: Writing task 1 General and Academic, and Writing task 2 you have 4 criteria which each have a band from 0 to 9. These 4 band scores are combined to get your overall score. Do take in mind that writing task 2 is weighed more. This means your overall score is 66% of the score of Writing task 2 and 33% of writing task 1. So, if you score 7 on writing task 2 and 5 on writing task 1 your total score would be 6.33333 which would be a 6.5 in total.

Writing:

Task Achievement

Coherence and Cohesion

Lexical Resource

Grammatical Range and Accuracy

Speaking:

Fluency and Coherence

Lexical Resource

Grammatical Range and Accuracy

Pronunciation

If you want to know more about the band descriptors just follow the links.