Band 5.0 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.0 · IELTS Complete Catalyst · 2026-08-25

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

Some people regard work as the most important thing in life and have little interest in anything else. Other people are more enthusiastic about their hobbies and leisure interests than their jobs.

Discuss both these attitudes and give your own opinion.

You should use your own ideas, knowledge and experience and support your arguments with examples and relevant evidence.

Student answer (Band 5.0)

There is no doubt if children do hard work they will fulfil any goal in life. The advantage of this is to build confidence and motivation in children to do unstoppable work to chase their life purpose but the disadvantages is, when the children consider a task easy and not try to utilize time because of over confidence.

In many cultures, the benefits of told children, that they could accomplish any purpose of life if they strive to give full potential to any task. In psychological perspective, these words are magical for children and boost their confidence to fight with difficulties. It also strengthens problem solving ability and creates positive and calm personalities. Children learn that all problems can be fixed so, they would experience less stress in challenging situations. For instance, the children, who are able to choose their career at very young age, must have confidence of words like they can do anything.

While it is undeniable that positive words built self-confidence, and motivates a child but sometimes it creates illusion in children’s mind about the success and they mislead themselves to right decision. As a result, children, who born multitalented become confused and don’t know that either they do this or that. Moreover, it creates false hopes and ignore reality based rule such as money limits, physical and mental capacity. For example, some children naturally genius towards maths whiles others, who have natural tendency toward arts, hate this subject.

In conclusion, the children should have positive behaviour about hard work because it helps to build their professional life in early age while, the flip side tell us that we also need to pay attention on real limits of the children.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response — Band 4.0

The response is largely off-topic. The prompt asks for a discussion on the balance between work and leisure/hobbies in adult life. However, the student has written an essay about the impact of telling children that hard work leads to success. Because the response fails to address the specific topic of work-life balance and instead focuses on child development and parental encouragement, it does not fulfill the requirements of the task. While the student presents a consistent position regarding the 'hard work' theme, it is not the theme requested by the prompt. Consequently, the task response is fundamentally misaligned with the instructions provided.

Coherence and Cohesion — Band 5.0

The essay is organized into paragraphs, but the progression of ideas is often confusing due to the lack of relevance to the prompt. Cohesive devices are used, such as 'In conclusion' and 'Moreover', but they are sometimes used mechanically or inappropriately given the content. For instance, the transition 'While it is undeniable that...' introduces a counter-argument that does not logically follow the previous paragraph's focus on child psychology. Paragraphing is present, but the internal logic within the paragraphs is weak, making it difficult for the reader to follow a clear line of argument regarding the actual topic of work-life balance.

Lexical Resource — Band 5.0

The vocabulary range is limited and often repetitive. There are several instances of awkward word choices and non-standard collocations, such as 'unstoppable work', 'born multitalented', and 'naturally genius towards maths'. These errors occasionally impede the reader's understanding. The student attempts to use more academic vocabulary like 'psychological perspective' and 'utilize', but the overall control is inconsistent. The lack of precision in word choice prevents the essay from reaching a higher band, as the language does not effectively convey complex ideas or nuanced arguments.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy — Band 5.0

The essay contains a high frequency of grammatical errors, including issues with subject-verb agreement ('the benefits of told children'), article usage, and sentence structure. Many sentences are fragmented or contain run-on structures that make them difficult to parse. For example, 'the children, who born multitalented become confused and don’t know that either they do this or that' is grammatically incorrect and lacks clarity. While there is an attempt to use complex sentences, the high error rate means that simple structures are often more accurate than complex ones. Punctuation is also inconsistent throughout the text.

See this exact question answered at other band scores — the same prompt compared across bands.

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