Know Your Real IELTS Band

You do one short task and get an estimated IELTS band back with the four official criteria scored separately. Write one paragraph, or speak for sixty seconds. It takes about three minutes, it costs nothing, and it needs no card and no password. You do enter an email, because that is where the full report goes and how you get back to it later.

The point is not the number on its own. It is the breakdown underneath it. A band on its own tells you where you are and nothing about what to change, which is why the report names the criterion costing you the most and quotes the sentences that put it there.

What gets marked, and against what

Writing is marked on the four official criteria: Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Speaking is marked on its own four: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation. Those are the same four headings a real examiner works from, and they are published by the test owners as the public band descriptors. All four carry equal weight, and the average is rounded to the nearest half band.

What an estimated band is, and what it is not

It is a practice estimate from one short answer. It is not an official IELTS result, and nothing produced here can be used as one. A single paragraph is a much smaller sample than a real test, so treat the first number as a starting point rather than a verdict, and expect it to move as you do more.

We publish how close our marking runs to our own reference set, re-measured every Saturday and posted whether the number improves or gets worse. You can read this week's figure, the method behind it and the limits we put on it on the scoring accuracy page. We think that is a fairer thing to show you than a claim.

What to do with the result

Take the weakest of the four criteria and work on that one alone for a week. Candidates lose bands in a specific place rather than everywhere at once, and lifting the criterion that is dragging the average moves the overall band faster than spreading effort evenly across all four.

From there: how IELTS bands are calculated, the band and visa points calculator if you need a specific score for immigration, or the practice library if you already know which module to drill.