IELTS Task 2 Band 6.5 Sample: Gap Year Pros and Cons, Pulled Down by Language (Part 2 of 3): Why Vocabulary and Grammar Stayed at 6

3. Why this essay got 6.5: the four criteria one by one (continued)

Lexical Resource 6: one invented phrase repeated three times

LR is the criterion that most needs work in this essay. The most serious problem is leaved students. I meant “students who have left school”, but English has no such phrase: the past participle of “leave” is “left”, and even “left students” would sound unnatural. The correct terms are “school leavers” (which is in the question!) or “high school graduates”. I used it three times, so the same word-formation error appears three times over, which is very noticeable.

What struck me most is that the very first sentence of the question says “school leavers”, yet I did not use it and invented a wrong phrase instead. The words in the question are the safest words you have. When you paraphrase the question you can change the sentence structure, but if you do not have a better synonym for a key noun, reusing the word from the question is far better than inventing one.

Why did I write “leaved students”? The first-language word-building trap

Looking back, I think “leaved students” came from translating the Chinese phrase for “students who have left school” piece by piece: “leave”, plus “-ed” to make it an adjective, plus “students”. This kind of “build it in English the way you would say it in your own language” word formation is a very common mistake among Taiwanese candidates (and, I suspect, many other learners), because it flows easily as you write and reads fine to you, so it never feels wrong.

The problem is that many English words for “a certain type of person” are fixed nouns, not combinations of “adjective + people / students”. Below are some common examples I have collected. The middle column is what you might write on instinct; the right column is what native speakers actually say:

My suggestion: whenever you write “a certain kind of person”, pause for a second and ask yourself, “Is this a phrase I have read, or one I have built myself?” If you built it, switch to the most conservative version, such as “students who have just finished school”. It is a little longer, but it cannot be wrong.

Grammatical Range & Accuracy 6: small errors spread across most sentences

The key difference between GRA 6 and 7 is how many sentences are error-free. Band 7 requires frequent error-free sentences, meaning most sentences have no errors; at Band 6 the errors are more widespread. When I counted, this essay has 15 sentences, and six or seven of them contain grammatical errors. Add the vocabulary errors, and fewer than half the sentences are completely clean:

None of these errors gets in the way of understanding, which is why the score stayed at 6 rather than going lower. But they appear too often, and together with the word-formation errors in LR, the examiner keeps being interrupted by small mistakes while reading. That is what “language at 6” feels like.

What separates LR 6 from LR 7?

If you put the public LR descriptors for Bands 6 and 7 side by side, you will see that the difference is not whether you use difficult words but whether you use them accurately:

This essay actually tries quite a few good phrases: “broaden their horizons”, “put the theory into practice”, “hectic schedule” and “financial burden” are all natural collocations, and they earn credit. Unfortunately, each one tends to sit next to a word-formation or spelling error, so it is hard for the examiner to judge whether I really know how to use vocabulary. Band 7 requires errors to be occasional; in this essay they repeat in a pattern, and that is why it was stuck at 6.

4. The major problems in this essay

Of these three problems, the first two are about language and the third is about logic. But they have one thing in common: all of them could have been caught in a final five-minute proofread. I wrote this essay in only 27 minutes. If I had kept 5–8 minutes purely for checking, I would very likely have spotted “leaved students” and the missing articles.

Content 7, language 6: why is the overall 6.5?

The four IELTS writing criteria are averaged, so each one counts for 25%. In other words, LR and GRA together make up half the score. However good the content is, if both language criteria stay at 6, it is very hard for the overall score to go above 6.5.

This table is my own calculation, but it shows one thing clearly: for this essay, the most efficient way to improve is not to think of better arguments but to cut the language errors down to “occasional”. If I simply fixed the repeated errors like “leaved students” and “well-bring” and made a few word choices more precise, LR would have a chance of reaching 7; and if I added the missing articles and “who”, the proportion of error-free sentences in GRA would rise sharply. This kind of progress does not require being cleverer, only being more careful.