Band 5.0 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.0 · Cambridge IELTS 21 · 2026-10-15

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

The plans below show a college cafe before it was redesigned and how it looks now.

Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The plans below show a college cafe before it was redesigned and how it looks now.

Student answer (Band 5.0)

The map describes a college café before and after design.

The kitchen was changed from serving area to hot meals. The staff dining rooms disappear giving their local to take away food and coffee bar. Bin was substituted by recycling bins and salad bar was implanted.

The barbecue was added with outdoor seating including chairs and tables.

Overall, the café had been more completely and organized over the time.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 4.0

You identify several genuine changes, including the replacement of the staff dining rooms with takeaway and coffee facilities, the addition of a salad bar, and the new outdoor seating and barbecue. However, the response reports only a small selection of the plan’s main features and gives little detail about what remained unchanged, such as the central tables and chairs and the toilets. The statement that “the kitchen was changed from serving area to hot meals” also confuses the kitchen with its serving counter: the kitchen stayed in place, while the counter’s function changed. The overview that the café became “more completely and organized” is unclear and does not summarise the main spatial changes. The response is also substantially below the required 150 words, limiting its coverage.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.0

The response has a basic sequence: it introduces the plans, lists several changes, and ends with an overall comment. This gives the reader some sense of organisation, and the ideas are mostly related to the task. However, the progression is very compressed, with no clear separation between an overview and detailed comparisons. The sentence “The staff dining rooms disappear giving their local to take away food and coffee bar” combines several changes in a way that is difficult to follow, while “Bin was substituted by recycling bins and salad bar was implanted” joins unrelated features. Use separate sentences or paragraphs to group changes by location, and add clear links such as “Meanwhile” or “In addition” where appropriate.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.0

You use some relevant plan vocabulary, including “staff dining rooms,” “take away food,” “coffee bar,” “recycling bins,” and “outdoor seating,” so the reader can recognise several features. However, the range is limited, and some word choices or collocations are inaccurate enough to make the description unclear. “Giving their local to” is not a natural way to describe replacement, “implanted” is unsuitable for a facility added to a café, and “more completely” does not express the intended overall comparison. “The map describes” is also less precise than language that identifies the plans and their changes. Build a small set of accurate terms for describing locations, additions, removals, and unchanged features, and check that each verb fits the context.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.0

The response uses mostly short, simple statements, with one attempt to connect ideas through “giving their local to.” This provides basic sentence control, but the range is limited and that longer construction is not formed clearly. Several sentences also omit or misuse grammatical elements: “Bin was substituted” needs an article, and “The kitchen was changed from serving area to hot meals” does not express the relationship between the kitchen and the counter accurately. The final sentence, “the café had been more completely and organized over the time,” has problems with verb form and parallel structure. Practise forming clear past-tense comparisons, using articles with singular countable nouns, and combining ideas in complete, well-controlled sentences.

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