From Band 6.5 to 7.0 in IELTS Writing: Looking Back on How I Prepared (Part 1 of 3): Where My 7.0 Came From, and the Early Stages

IELTS · Practice Methods中文版　Updated 2026/11/09

In this post: Where my Writing 7.0 actually came from, a timeline from December 2021 to July 2024, and the first two stages of my preparation: building up slowly, then intensive marking after my offer.

This is the review post of the Practice Methods series, and it also works as an entry point to the whole IELTS Writing series. Two other posts in this series cover how to find recurring problems in your practice records and how to turn marked essays into notes. This one takes a longer view and looks back at my whole writing preparation.

To be clear from the start: every date and score in this post comes from my score log, the re-mark posts I have already published on this site, and my tutor reviews. Where I have no records, I won’t fill in details. The “advice” parts are clearly labelled; they are my thoughts looking back, and they don’t mean I did every step this way at the time.

1. The result first: where my Writing 7.0 came from

My final result was an overall 8.0 (L 8.5, R 8.5, W 7.0, S 7.0), after 7 tests plus 1 one-skill retake.

I want to be precise about where the Writing 7.0 came from. On 4 July 2024 I took a computer-delivered Writing one-skill retake (IELTS One Skill Retake lets you resit a single skill) with IDP. The result came out at noon on 9 July, and Writing was still 6.5. I requested a re-mark (an Enquiry on Results) at 8 pm that evening, and the result came back just after 10 pm: Writing went from 6.5 to 7.0, and my overall score from 7.5 to 8.0. I described this in my post on my successful IDP re-mark (in Chinese).

So this isn’t a story about suddenly writing a 7 one day. Before that, Writing 6.5 had come up many times, and three re-marks had failed. Looking at my records, the most visible change came from my practice between May and July 2024.

2. Timeline overview: December 2021 to July 2024

Laid out like this, the timeline shows a clear contrast: in both the May and June 2024 tests, Writing was 6.5, and neither re-mark changed it. In the July one-skill retake, the original score was also 6.5, but it became 7.0 after re-marking. The two months in between are what sections 5 and 6 (in Part 2) are about.

3. Stage 1 (December 2021 – 2023): starting to write, building up slowly

The first essay in my score log dates from December 2021. In 2022 and 2023 I was preparing part-time, wrote relatively few essays, and had them marked mainly by Farid and other teachers.

I took Farid’s classes for about fourteen months in total (13 lessons of 25 minutes and 21 lessons of 50 minutes). The classes focused on speaking but also included live writing feedback: I emailed my essay before class, and he corrected it on a shared screen over Zoom. I described how the lessons worked in my review of Farid’s lessons (in Chinese).

In early 2023 I requested my first re-mark. That was a British Council paper-based test, so all four skills were re-marked together. I waited about a week, and the score didn’t go up.

What characterised this stage

• Fewer essays: compared with the 2024 sprint, this wasn’t a period of writing intensively.
• Essays started to accumulate: everything I wrote in this period went into my score log and later became part of my notes (see how to turn marked essays into notes for the structure).
• No systematic record of criterion scores yet: my score log recorded the essay number, date, question, source, marker, question number and corrections, but had no columns for the four criterion scores.

4. Stage 2 (March – May 2024): getting the offer, then intensive marking

In early April 2024, I received a conditional offer from the University of Cambridge, which required an overall 7.5 with at least 7.0 in each skill. After many tests, my Speaking and Writing were still stuck at 6.5.

According to my score log, March to May 2024 was my most intensive period of writing: I sent essays to different teachers and wrote almost one a day. On 16 May I took a computer-delivered test with the British Council and got Writing 6.5 and Speaking 6.0. On 21 May I requested a re-mark for Writing and Speaking, and the result came out the next day: no change. I wrote about the timing of this re-mark in three re-marks in a row, all unsuccessful (in Chinese).

Looking back on this stage

I wrote a lot, and often, but my records show this hadn’t yet fed through to my test scores. Looking back, I can see one limitation: the marking came from different teachers, each with their own standards and style of feedback, and my score log had no columns for criterion scores. That made it hard to compare whether “this week’s essays are better than last week’s” or which criterion was actually dragging my score down.

That doesn’t mean intensive practice was useless. The essays and corrections from that period all went into my notes. It’s just that “writing a lot” on its own wasn’t enough to get me from 6.5 to 7.