IELTS Task 1 Table Samples: Band 6.5 vs Band 7 Compared (Part 1 of 3): The Verdict and the Band 6.5 Essay

IELTS · Band Score Samples中文版　Updated 2026/11/09

In this post: What separates a 6 from a 7 on a table, then my Band 6.5 underground railway essay and why its TA stopped at 6.

On 13 June 2024 I wrote two table essays on the same day and sent them for marking. After finishing the first one, on underground railway systems, I added a question for my marker at the end. In short, it was: “Tables and charts have so many details. How can I write concisely? I find it hard to work out which data are important.”

I think many candidates have the same question. A table does not have the obvious shape of a line graph, and it is not a pie chart with only a few slices. It is a block of numbers, and every cell looks equally important. The scores for those two essays were 6.5 for the underground railways and 7 for the Fairtrade sales, but both got only 6 for Task Achievement (TA). Three weeks later (2 July) I wrote a table essay on student satisfaction with university facilities, and TA finally reached 7.

In this three-part series (the two Band 7 essays are in Part 2) I put all three essays side by side, exactly as I submitted them (spelling and grammar mistakes kept; the question I added after the essay is not part of the essay, so I have left it out). The score explanations are my own analysis against the public IELTS band descriptors, and I also use these three essays to answer the question I asked at the time: how do you actually pick the key features in a table?

1. The verdict first: what separates a 6 from a 7 on a table

In the band descriptors, TA 6 means the response “presents an overview with information appropriately selected”, but details may be irrelevant, inappropriate or inaccurate; TA 7 means it “clearly presents and highlights key features”. On a table, the step from 6 to 7 is often not about whether the numbers are right. The figures in the underground and Fairtrade essays are almost all correct. It is about whether you have chosen the real key features and compared them.

2. The Band 6.5 essay: underground railways in six cities (TA 6)

What the task asks

This was a table question from an online practice bank (Essay 22). I wrote it on 13 June 2024 without recording the time, and the essay is about 220 words. The table gives three pieces of information about the underground railway systems in six cities (London, Paris, Tokyo, Washington DC, Kyoto and Los Angeles): the year each opened, the route length in kilometres, and passengers per year in millions.

The most interesting thing about this table is not the top value in any one column but the gaps between columns: London is the oldest and longest, yet it is only third for passengers; Tokyo’s network is shorter than Paris’s, yet it carries the most people. Another broad pattern is that the earlier a system opened, the longer and busier it tends to be; the three systems opened after 1970 each carry fewer than 150 million passengers a year.

Score card

My original essay

Why this essay got 6.5

Task Achievement 6: the overview is correct, but a whole city is missing and there is no comparison across columns. First, what went right. The overview, London is the city which has oldest and longest underground system, and the system in Tokyo has biggest number of passengers, plus Kyoto being the shortest with the fewest users, makes four judgements that are all correct, and each one is an extreme value in the table. Every figure I wrote is also accurate.

The problem is selection:

• Washington never appears. Leaving out one city in six means a sixth of the data is gone. Its figures are not extremes (1976, 126 km, 144 million passengers), but it actually matters: its route is almost as long as Tokyo’s, yet it carries less than a tenth as many passengers.
• London’s passenger numbers are missing. The overview says London is the oldest and longest, but the passenger paragraph only covers the busiest and quietest cities, so London’s 775 million is skipped. That happens to be one of the most interesting contrasts in the whole table: the longest system is not the busiest.
• One paragraph per column, each listing the top two and bottom two. One paragraph for opening year, one for length, one for passengers, each giving “the two biggest and the two smallest”. It looks systematic, but there is no link between the three paragraphs, so the reader cannot see how the opening year relates to length and passengers. This is also why Washington was left out: it sits in the middle of every column, so a “top two, bottom two” filter never catches it.
• A small contradiction. most cities started to have underground railway system after 1900, except London, but the next sentence says Paris opened in 1900, and 1900 is not “after 1900”. Changing it to in or after 1900 fixes it.

Put together, these problems are what TA 6 looks like: there is an overview, the numbers are right and the selection is broadly sensible, but the key features are not highlighted enough and some data are missing.

Coherence & Cohesion 7: each of the three body paragraphs has a clear topic (Regarding open date, As for the length, Moving to the number of users), and the order inside each paragraph is consistent. What holds it back is the lack of links between paragraphs, plus the awkward structure not only Kyoto but also Los Angeles do not have that many users, which uses not only … but also in a negative sentence, and the unclear reference in in comparison with that in other cities (it should be those).

Lexical Resource 7: the words for passengers vary (passengers, commuters, travelers, users), and the busiest ones is natural. The errors are less number of users (it should be fewer users or a smaller number of users) and with the figure for 394 kilometers (it should be with figures of).

Grammatical Range & Accuracy 7: plenty of relative clauses. The errors include a city that underground system opened in 1863 (it should be whose), has oldest and longest and has biggest number (superlatives missing the), and The system in Kyoto and Los Angeles … has (two systems, so it should be plural).