Let's straighten out a thing or two, shall we? #LongRead It h | IELTS Proficiency

Let's straighten out a thing or two, shall we? #LongRead

It has become a hype to get your essays checked by certain IELTS Instructors like Beyden Dingle. While their correction service can be of great help in your preparation, there are a number of factors at play regarding the marks they give you. The following are some of them.

Exam conditions

This is probably the most important factor of all in assessing your report/essay justly. If you get your essays checked by me or any other IELTS Instructor for that matter, you need to understand that the score we are giving you to your work depends on that particular essay. This means that we don't know if you wrote the essay using a dictionary or exceeding the time limit. This is why when you get a higher score than expected in such corrections services, take this into account; maybe you didn't write it under exam conditions. As for me, I wrote the above report within 20 minutes, (I spent about 15 minutes on the writing and planning and 5 minutes on checking) but I also used a dictionary at the same time to make sure I'm sharing a quality report with my audience. So, you can subtract a 0.5 from the overall score.

Subjective score

Usually, the score you get in a mock test or something doesn't necessarily match the score you will get in your real exam. Take it from me. Beyden himself made this clear in the pdf file I shared just now: the score could vary. My report may not deserve an 8.5 in the eyes of another examiner because of the human factor involved. I'm not going so far as to say that my writing score is 8.5. My intention was to give you a better idea of how 'overview' is written to the 'process' questions of Task 1. As you can see, he gave me a 9.0 for TA, which shows that my approach was more or less correct.

Preparation

Even if you see a certain teacher like myself write an essay or a task 1 report LIVE, do not quickly jump to a conclusion that I'm writing it in the real time with zero preparation (although most of the time I don't prepare at all, even on my YouTube videos). This is the reason why you probably get a surprisingly high band score in mock tests and what have you and end up scoring lower than expected in your real exam.

On a side note: If you are the kind of student who has someone check their essays just for the sake of receiving a particular band score, then you are on the wrong path. Even in the actual test, your score may vary from examiner to examiner. Getting your essays checked should only serve one purpose: learning from your mistakes. Every time I send my essay to Beyden, I expect to get a piece of invaluable feedback on my mistakes. After all, you improve your writing by learning from your mistakes not rejoicing at your seemingly high band score.

@ieltsulugbeks