Each of the four criteria receives a score from 0 to 9 points. After that, an arithmetic mean is calculated to determine the task’s total score. For example, if Task 1 gets following marks:
- Task Achievement: 6.0,
- Coherence and Cohesion: 7.5,
- Lexical Resource: 7.0,
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy – 7.5.
then score for IELTS Task 1 is (6.0+7.5+7.0+7.5)/4 =7.0.
Task 2 contributes twice as much as Task 1 to the Writing score, thus, Task 1 is worth 33% of the total mark in the Writing test. So, if you get 6.5 for task 2 and 7.0 for task 1, the total score for IELTS Writing Section is
6.5*(2/3) +(7.0) *1/3 = 6.666.
But scores are reported in whole and half bands. For instance:
- if you get an overall score of 5.25, it goes up to the band 5.5
- if it is 5.75 it will go up to band 6.0.
- if it is 5.1 it goes down to band 5.
Since 6.66 is less than 6.75, the final band score will be rounded to 6.5