IELTS Task 2 agree or disagree band 8 sample: crime and punishment

The difference between a band 7 and a band 8 answer on an agree/disagree question is almost never vocabulary. It is what the essay does with its position: a band 7 answer states a clear view and keeps it, while a band 8 answer states a clear view, gives the opposing argument its strongest form, concedes what deserves conceding, and still comes out the other side with the position intact. Below is a complete crime-and-punishment essay written for this article, scored criterion by criterion, followed by the specific points where a band 7 version of the same essay would have gone differently.

Everything here — the prompt, the essay, the commentary — was written for this article. None of it is an official IELTS model answer, and no official answer for this task appears on this page. The four criteria are described in my own words rather than quoted from the published descriptors.

What an agree disagree essay needs to reach IELTS band 8

An agree/disagree prompt asks for a position on a single claim. You can agree fully, disagree fully, or agree in part — and the third option is where most band 8 answers live, because most claims hold under some conditions and fail under others.

Partial agreement is also where most band 7 answers lose their extra half band. The failure is predictable: the candidate writes "I agree to some extent", spends one paragraph supporting the claim, spends a second attacking it, and finishes with "therefore both approaches are important". Read as a whole, that essay has no position — two paragraphs and a shrug. The examiner cannot tell what the candidate thinks, so the response to the task is only partial, and Task Response settles at 7 or below however good the language is.

The fix is structural, not linguistic. A partial agreement has to settle three things in the introduction:

• Direction. Which side is your default answer? "Mostly yes" and "mostly no" are different essays.
• The dividing line. What exactly decides which cases fall outside your agreement? Not "in some cases" — name the criterion.
• The obligation. Whatever exception you announce, the body must actually deal with it, not forget it.

Do those three things and partial agreement reads as precision. Skip them and it reads as indecision.

The task and the band 8 essay

Task 2 prompt (written for this article, not a past paper):

Some people believe that rehabilitation programmes reduce crime more effectively than prison sentences. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.

Sample answer (295 words):

The claim that rehabilitation outperforms imprisonment as a crime-reduction tool is, in my view, correct for the large majority of offenders, but not for all of them. I agree with the argument where offending is driven by addiction, poverty or a lack of employable skills; I reject it where an offender poses a continuing physical threat to others.

The core weakness of a purely punitive approach is that it suspends offending rather than ending it. A prison sentence removes a person from society for a fixed period, but on release that person usually returns to the same neighbourhood, the same associates and the same absence of legitimate income that produced the crime in the first place. Rehabilitation attacks these conditions directly. Drug treatment, literacy classes and vocational training give an offender something to lose and something to do, and a released prisoner who holds a job has an alternative to theft that did not previously exist. Punishment alone offers no such alternative; it simply pauses the problem.

The opposing view is not without force. Advocates of tougher sentencing argue that predictable, severe penalties deter calculated crime, and this is persuasive in the case of premeditated offences such as fraud, where the offender weighs risk against reward before acting. I accept that deterrence works in these circumstances. What it cannot do, however, is remove the underlying causes of impulsive or dependency-driven crime, which is why deterrence should supplement rehabilitation rather than replace it. The one clear exception is the violent repeat offender: where a person is likely to injure others, incapacitation is the only reliable protection, and no treatment programme can be relied upon in the interim.

Overall, rehabilitation should be the default response to crime, with imprisonment reserved for those who genuinely endanger the public.

Note what the essay does not contain: a single number. No reoffending rate, no prison population figure, no country comparison. Crime and punishment tempts candidates into inventing data, and invented data earns nothing. The support here is reasoning — the released prisoner returns to the same conditions, the fraudster calculates before acting — which is what the task asks for.

The four criteria, scored

Criterion	Band
Task Response	8
Coherence and Cohesion	8
Lexical Resource	8
Grammatical Range and Accuracy	8
Task 2 band	8.0

The arithmetic is a straight average of the four: 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 = 32, and 32 ÷ 4 = 8.0. That is the Task 2 score only. Your Writing section band combines both tasks, with Task 2 counted twice: (Task 1 + Task 2 × 2) ÷ 3, rounded. An 8.0 here alongside a 7.0 in Task 1 would give (7 + 16) ÷ 3 = 7.67, rounded to 7.5.

Task Response — 8. The position is fixed in sentence one ("correct for the large majority of offenders, but not for all of them") and made operational in sentence two, which names the dividing line: agree where offending comes from addiction, poverty or missing skills, reject where the offender is a continuing physical danger. That is a criterion, not a hedge. The body honours it — the third paragraph returns to that exception with "the violent repeat offender" rather than inventing a new one — and the conclusion restates the same boundary in different words.

Coherence and Cohesion — 8. Each paragraph announces its own job in its first sentence: "The core weakness of a purely punitive approach…" and "The opposing view is not without force." Cohesion runs through reference rather than connector labels — "these conditions" points back to the neighbourhood/associates/income list, and "What it cannot do, however" points back to deterrence. The essay uses one signposting word in total ("Overall"), and no sentence needs re-reading to find what it refers to.

Lexical Resource — 8. The strength is precision rather than rarity. "Incapacitation", "premeditated offences", "dependency-driven" and "legitimate income" are the exact terms for the ideas they carry, and the collocations hold: "weighs risk against reward", "poses a continuing physical threat", "suspends offending rather than ending it". The topic is also paraphrased under pressure — "imprisonment", "a purely punitive approach", "tougher sentencing" — without drifting in meaning.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy — 8. Complex structures appear because the meaning needs them, not as decoration. The cleft "What it cannot do, however, is remove the underlying causes…" throws the contrast where the argument wants it, and "where a person is likely to injure others…" sets a condition that matches the essay's conditional position. The triple "the same neighbourhood, the same associates and the same absence of legitimate income" is controlled parallelism. Punctuation is accurate, including two correctly used semicolons, and the answer is essentially error-free.

For the logic behind what each criterion measures, our IELTS Writing band descriptors explained guide covers it in detail, and Band 8 IELTS essay example shows the same band reached on a different Task 2 question type — useful for seeing which band 8 features are question-type-specific and which are not.

Three places a band 7 version would have differed

Candidates who write this essay at band 7 are usually not making grammar mistakes. They are making three structural choices instead.

1. The introduction would have hedged instead of dividing. A band 7 introduction typically reads: "I agree with this statement to some extent, although prison also has its benefits." The position exists — that is why it is still band 7 — but nothing tells the examiner what "some extent" covers. The band 8 version replaces the hedge with a rule: addiction, poverty and missing skills on one side; continuing physical danger on the other. Same partial agreement, but now it is testable against the body.

2. The counterargument paragraph would have changed the position instead of surviving it. This is the most common ceiling on agree/disagree essays. The candidate presents the opposing view fairly, finds it convincing while writing it, and ends the paragraph somewhere new: "Therefore, both punishment and rehabilitation are equally necessary." The introduction said "mostly rehabilitation"; the body now says fifty-fifty. The band 8 paragraph concedes deterrence in one sentence ("I accept that deterrence works in these circumstances") and then immediately subordinates it again ("which is why deterrence should supplement rehabilitation rather than replace it"). The concession is real, and the position does not move.

3. Cohesion would have rested on labels rather than reference. Band 7 paragraphs often open with "Firstly", "Moreover", "On the other hand" — machinery announcing structure the paragraph should be demonstrating anyway. When every paragraph starts with a connector, the connectors stop carrying information. The essay above opens with content and lets pronouns, demonstratives and repeated key nouns do the linking.

A fourth difference is worth a mention: band 7 answers on this topic often reach for statistics they cannot verify, or for showy vocabulary in the wrong register. Neither buys a band. For a close look at where the 6.5-to-7 line sits before you aim at 8, band 6.5 vs band 7 works through that smaller gap sentence by sentence.

Length, timing and the 250-word minimum

Task 2 asks for at least 250 words. That number is a floor, not a target, and not a score: 400 words does not raise your band, and 240 does not automatically sink it — but going under the minimum gives the examiner grounds to treat the response as underdeveloped, which hits Task Response directly.

The sample above is 295 words, a comfortable range for a Task 2 answer: two developed body paragraphs, a real conclusion, and time left to check agreement, articles and punctuation. Candidates who push past 350 words usually get there by repeating themselves or by adding a third idea they cannot support, and the extra length brings extra errors. One idea properly extended beats three listed. The official task requirements are on ielts.org.

How to test your own agree/disagree essay

Run three checks on your draft.

First, cover the body and read only your introduction. Can a reader predict what your body paragraphs will argue, and name your exception? If the answer is "it depends" or "in some cases", you have hedged rather than divided.

Second, read only your conclusion, then only your introduction. If the two describe different balances of opinion, your counterargument paragraph moved your position without telling you.

Third, delete every connector at the start of every paragraph. If the paragraphs no longer link, your cohesion was resting on labels; rewrite the openings so the content itself does the connecting.

Those three checks catch most of what separates a band 7 from a band 8 on this question type. Then write again on a new prompt — the same claim reversed, or any claim you can take a genuinely qualified position on — and see whether the pattern holds.

FAQ

Is partial agreement allowed?

Yes, and it is where most band 8 answers live. It only works if the introduction fixes the direction, names the dividing line, and commits the body to dealing with the exception.

Why does "I agree to some extent" so often cap at 7?

Because a paragraph for, a paragraph against and "both are important" is not a position. Task Response registers that as a partial answer to the task, whatever the language is doing.

Do I need statistics?

No. The essay above has no numbers at all and scores 8 across the board. Reasoning is the support the task asks for; invented figures earn nothing and cost you sentences.

How long should the essay be?

At least 250 words — a floor, not a target. The sample is 295, which leaves time to check. Past about 350 most candidates are repeating themselves and adding errors.

Does an 8.0 on Task 2 mean a Writing band of 8.0?

No. Writing is (Task 1 + Task 2 × 2) ÷ 3, rounded. An 8.0 here with a 7.0 on Task 1 reports as 7.5.

Related reading

• Band 8 IELTS essay example — the same band on a different Task 2 question type
• Band 6.5 vs band 7 essay — the smaller gap, sentence by sentence
• IELTS Writing band descriptors explained — what each criterion is measuring
• How to get band 7 in IELTS Writing — the four criteria as conditions to meet

Official task requirements are on ielts.org.