Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 2 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Cambridge IELTS 11 · 2026-10-01

IELTS Writing Task 2 question

Some people say that in all levels of education, from primary schools to universities, too much time is spent on learning facts and not enough on learning practical skills.

Do you agree or disagree?

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

 

Student answer (Band 5.5)

Some people believe that from primary schools to universities ,too much focus is placed on learning theoretical subjects and not enough on developing practical skills. I agree with this notion as it is essential for students to acquire practical skills that they can apply in the workplace in the future. I will explain my reasons in the following paragraphs with relevant examples.

One important reason for developing enough practical skills during the learning process is that student can feel more confident and build a strong foundation for their future careers. During professional work culture student can find esay to adopt workculture and their performance is better than employer expectations. For example, if student are fully trained and prepare for teamwork and other require skills at workplace, they can adopt it easily during their employement. Therefore, education sectors has to provide enough knowledge relates to practical skills by considering their future necessity.

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 4.5

Your response sits at this band primarily because it fails to meet the minimum length requirement of 250 words, stopping short at only 151 words. Consequently, your position is only partially addressed and remains underdeveloped. While you state your agreement with the prompt in the introduction, the body paragraphs lack sufficient depth and extended examples. To reach a higher band, you must develop your ideas much further, provide more substantial reasoning, and ensure you fully meet the required word count to thoroughly cover all parts of the task.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 6.0

Your essay demonstrates a coherent overall arrangement and clear paragraphing, dividing your thoughts into an introduction and a supporting body paragraph. You use basic cohesive devices such as 'For example' and 'Therefore' to connect your ideas. However, referencing is sometimes unclear, and the progression of thought can feel slightly mechanical. To achieve a higher score, you should ensure a smoother logical progression throughout your response and make more flexible, varied use of cohesive devices to link your sentences and paragraphs naturally.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

You display an adequate range of vocabulary for the task, successfully attempting less common items like 'theoretical subjects', 'professional work culture', and 'necessity'. However, there are noticeable word choice and spelling inaccuracies, such as writing 'esay' instead of 'easy', 'employement' instead of 'employment', and awkward phrasings like 'require skills' instead of 'required skills'. These errors do not seriously impede communication, but they prevent you from accessing a higher band. To improve, focus on precise word forms, correct spelling, and natural collocations.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

You use a mix of simple and some complex sentence forms, such as your conditional structure 'if student are fully trained...'. However, there are several grammar and punctuation errors, including missing pluralization ('student' instead of 'students'), incorrect subject-verb agreement ('education sectors has' instead of 'sectors have'), and a missing space after a comma in your first sentence. While these errors rarely impede overall communication, they demonstrate a limited control of grammatical structures and punctuation. To improve, you need to use a wider variety of complex structures with greater accuracy.

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

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