Academic Writing 1 — a data set and an essay

A complete Academic Writing paper, printed and answered by hand: Task 1 in twenty minutes, Task 2 in forty, then photograph the pages and get each task checked separately.

Task 1 gives you three years of figures from one university library — visits to the building, loans of printed books, e-book downloads, bookings of study rooms — and asks you to describe what they show. Two things decide the mark. The first is the overview: one sentence naming the overall pattern before any numbers, and it is the element candidates most often leave out altogether. The second is what you must not do — explain. The figures do not say why anything changed, and a paragraph of invented reasons is not a better answer, it is a worse one.

Task 2 asks whether a university should teach only subjects that lead to employment, and it is worth double. It contains two instructions, not one: discuss both positions, and give your own view. Answering half of that caps the response mark however good the English is.

The check comes back task by task, against five things: length, task achievement or response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy. It reports what your answer did not do rather than a band score — a band is a judgement against descriptors held to a common standard by trained examiners, and before the test a list of what is missing is more use to you than a number.

The ruled lines are not the word count. Continue on the back of the sheet or on one extra page, and photograph everything you wrote on; the upload takes one page more than the paper has.

Written by Zestly. No IELTS material is reproduced, and the library figures are an illustration rather than a published statistic.

• Open Task 1 with an overview sentence before any figures
• Describe data without inventing reasons for it
• Group figures into patterns instead of reciting them one row at a time
• Answer both halves of a Task 2 prompt and hold one position throughout
• Find out what 150 and 250 words are in your own handwriting, at speed

Describe what these figures show. Pick out the main patterns and make the comparisons that matter. Do not try to explain why the changes happened: the figures do not say, and guessing costs marks rather than earning them.