Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Cambridge IELTS 21 · 2026-10-02

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

All university undergraduate courses should include a period of time spent studying abroad or doing a work placement.

Do you think the advantages of this would outweigh the disadvantages?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Student answer (Band 5.5)

All university graduate courses should provide or include a period of time spent studying abroad or doing work placement. Which can provide a lot of career opportunities for students to grow further in their lives. However, from my perspective the advantages of this would overlap the disadvantages.

The primary arguement in the favour of this is that, college or university providing opportunity to study abroad or work placement can help a lot of students to outgrow their current life situation. This favour can completely transform the lives of form worrying about future or placement into massive chances to transform their lives. For example, traditionally the rural student after completing undergraduate course runs toward finding other university to study or tends to find work placement to earn which makes the life of student really hectic and full of anxiety. In this point of view students life is totally rotated from finding it to be given already.

Likewise, when students are given such chances, they get a way to live in their own independent life opening to self-growth, confidence and sharing culture values leading to cross-culture communication and leading to scope of exposure of real life work experiences reducing job unemployment for students.

However, apart from some advantages, this implementation has a huge cost for instance like university may struggle to find enough quality internship programs for all the student, also the cost of living abroad may add stress to students life.

In conclusion, apart from all the hurdles of finding quality internship for large digit of student and cost of living abroad it adds the huge opening to many golden opportunity of job employment and work life experiences which add more advantages than disadvantages.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.5

The response addresses the prompt by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of including studying abroad or work placements in undergraduate courses, and states a clear position that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. However, the development of ideas remains limited and under-developed. For instance, the paragraph discussing rural students running toward finding other universities is somewhat unclear and wanders off the main point. Furthermore, the discussion of the disadvantages is brief, merely mentioning costs and internship availability without deeper elaboration or supporting examples. To move to a higher band, the writer needs to extend and support all ideas more fully throughout the response, ensuring every argument directly contributes to answering the prompt without relying on sweeping generalizations.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 5.5

There is a discernible overall organisation to the essay, featuring an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion, which shows some basic structure. However, there is no clear overall progression; the transition between ideas can feel abrupt. Cohesive devices are sometimes inaccurate or awkward, such as starting a sentence with 'Which can provide...' as a sentence fragment, or using 'In this point of view students life is totally rotated...' which fails to connect logically to the preceding sentence. Paragraphing is attempted, but paragraph boundaries and internal logical flow need to be managed more skilfully to achieve a higher score. To improve, the writer should ensure that referencing is clear and that cohesive devices are used accurately to guide the reader smoothly through the argument.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

The vocabulary used is minimally adequate for the task, providing a sufficient range to express basic points, such as 'career opportunities', 'independent life', and 'cost of living'. However, there are noticeable lexical errors and awkward word choices that can cause some difficulty for the reader, such as 'overlap the disadvantages' (instead of 'outweigh'), 'arguement' (spelling error), and 'large digit of student' (inappropriate collocation). Attempts to use less common vocabulary often result in unnatural phrasing. To reach the next band, the writer must expand their vocabulary range and improve control over word choice, spelling, and collocations so that less common lexical items are used more precisely and naturally.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.0

The response displays a very limited range of structures, and attempts at complex sentences are frequently faulty. There are frequent errors in grammar and punctuation that can cause difficulty for the reader, including sentence fragments such as 'Which can provide a lot of career opportunities...', subject-verb agreement issues like 'university may struggle... for all the student', and missing articles. Punctuation errors are also present, such as unnecessary comma splices or misplaced commas. To improve this area, the writer needs to increase the variety of error-free sentences, improve control over basic grammar rules including pluralisation and article use, and avoid breaking complex ideas into fragmented or ungrammatical clauses.

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

Browse more IELTS Writing model answers or get your own writing scored by the same AI examiner.