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IELTS Writing band scores calculation

IELTS examiners must hold a relevant teaching qualification and extensive teaching experience to be able to become a qualified IELTS examiner. These qualified examiners mark your IELTS Writing test against clearly defined assessment criteria and their performance is subject to an extensive and detailed review regularly.

Your IELTS Writing test is marked by between 2 and 4 examiners to ensure the highest level of accuracy and fairness in the marks awarded. The assessment criteria used by examiners is the same for both the General Training and Academic tests.

Your answers in IELTS Writing Task 1 are assessed against the following criteria: task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource and grammatical range and accuracy. Writing Task 2 is assessed in much the same way except for the task response criterion. Each IELTS Writing score matches the performance in the descriptors across these four criteria. To find out more about the assessment criteria used by IELTS examiners, search online for the IELTS Writing public band descriptors.

Your IELTS Writing band score contributes to your overall IELTS band score.

IELTS Writing score calculator

In the IELTS exam, there are two categories of scores. The raw score represents the number of correctly answered questions. This raw score is subsequently converted into the band score, which ranges from 0 to 9.

IELTS Writing band scores

IELTS Writing score

Skill level

9

Expert

8

Very good

7

Good

6

Competent

5

Modest

4

Limited

3

Extremely limited

2

Intermittent

1

Non-user

0

Test not attempted

Band scores