You can check if your IELTS essay is band 7 before the exam, but only criterion by criterion. A four-pass self-check, its two blind spots and a timeline.
You can check whether your IELTS essay is band 7 before the test, and the check is worth doing — but only if you mark the four criteria separately. Reread the essay as a whole and ask whether it feels like a 7, and the answer will almost always be yes, because a general impression rewards fluency, and fluency is not what any one criterion measures.
Below is a procedure for one timed essay: four passes, one criterion each, and in every pass you must point at a sentence of your own before you give yourself the 7. Then the two places it reliably fails, what to check two weeks and three days out, and what to do when your verdict and an outside score disagree.
One essay, checked as four separate questions.
A Writing band is not awarded to an essay as a whole. Each task is marked on four criteria — for Task 2, Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy, with Task Achievement taking the place of Task Response in Task 1 — and the task score comes from the four together. A band 7 essay is not an essay that impresses. It is one where the criteria land at 7 on their own evidence.
That is why a holistic reread cannot do the job: each impression leaks into the others. Confident vocabulary makes a thin argument look developed, and smooth sentences hide a paragraph that answers a slightly different question from the one set.
The 6/7 boundary is also written in words of degree, which a general impression cannot measure. In Task Response, band 6 says the main parts of the prompt "are addressed (though some may be more fully covered than others)"; band 7 says they "are appropriately addressed" and that "a clear and developed position is presented". In grammar, band 6 says "flexibility is limited"; band 7 says "error-free sentences are frequent". Whether your essay is on one side of those lines or the other is a question about specific sentences, so the check has to be made of specific sentences.
One more practical point: IELTS states that "The assessment of Task 2 carries more weight in marking than Task 1." If you only have time to check one kind of essay, check a Task 2 essay. The full band-by-band wording is set out in IELTS Writing band descriptors explained.
Three rules before you start. Use an essay written under time — 40 minutes for Task 2 — not one you polished over an evening. Leave at least a few hours, ideally a night, between writing and checking, so you read the page rather than your memory of it. And write the evidence down: a pass is not finished until there is a sentence copied or a number counted next to your verdict.
Each pass ends in one of three verdicts: 7 (the band 7 wording is met and you can point at where), 6 (the feature is there, but not to the degree the band 7 wording asks), or below 6 (the feature is missing).
Step 1 — Task Response: map the prompt. Write each question or instruction in the prompt on its own line. Beside each, write the number of the paragraph that answers it and copy the single sentence that answers it most directly. Then write your position in one sentence and check that every body paragraph argues for it. For a 7, every line needs a paragraph, not a clause, and the position has to be extended through the essay rather than stated in the introduction and repeated in the conclusion. If one line is answered only by a clause, the verdict is 6. If one line has nothing beside it, you are reading the band 5 wording: "The main parts of the prompt are incompletely addressed."
Step 2 — Coherence and Cohesion: read the first sentences only. Read just the opening sentence of each paragraph, in order. If those sentences alone give the argument in sequence, the progression is there. Then circle every connector that opens a sentence — Firstly, Moreover, However — and underline every reference word: this, these, such, the same, doing so. The band 7 line names "reference and substitution" explicitly. If the circles far outnumber the underlines, you are looking at the band 6 description of cohesion that "may be faulty or mechanical", however tidy the paragraphs look.
Step 3 — Lexical Resource: test five words and three. List the five words you would most like credit for. For each, copy the phrase it sits in and check it against the example sentences in a learner's dictionary. Then find the three most generic words in the essay — important, good, a lot of, things — and ask whether the meaning needed something more exact. Band 7 asks for "some flexibility and precision" and "an awareness of style and collocation". If your ambitious words are the ones that fail the dictionary check, the band 6 descriptor has a sentence for it: "If the writer is a risk-taker, there will be a wider range of vocabulary used but higher degrees of inaccuracy or inappropriacy."
Step 4 — Grammatical Range and Accuracy: number and mark every sentence. Number the sentences. Mark each one as error-free or not, and mark the ones built on a complex structure — a relative clause, a conditional, a subordinate clause of reason or concession. Band 7 needs both halves: "a variety of complex structures is used with some flexibility and accuracy" and "error-free sentences are frequent". The descriptor gives no number, so do not invent a threshold. Look instead at where the errors sit. If they cluster in the complex sentences, that is the band 6 line almost exactly: "Examples of more complex structures are not marked by the same level of accuracy as in simple structures."
Write the four verdicts in a row. Within a task the four criteria are weighted equally, so one 6 among three 7s is a different situation from two 6s: (6 + 6 + 7 + 7) ÷ 4 is 6.5, while (6 + 7 + 7 + 7) ÷ 4 is 6.75, and how a quarter band resolves is not published. Either way, the lowest verdict is the one to act on.
You fill the gap from memory. A reader cannot.
The four passes remove most of the inflation a holistic reread produces. They cannot remove all of it, because the person gathering the evidence is the person who wrote the essay. Two failures survive the procedure.
Reading your intentions into Task Response. You know what your third paragraph was meant to prove, so when you reread it your memory supplies the step the page leaves out. Step 1 helps, because copying a sentence forces you to look at the page — but writers still choose the sentence that nearly answers the question and count it. A harder test: cover the prompt, read only the body paragraphs, and write down the question you think this essay is answering. If what you write is not the question set, the essay has drifted, and the drift is exactly what an examiner reading without your memory will see. Better still, ask someone else.
Not seeing the errors you have always made. Errors you have repeated for years stop looking like errors. Articles, uncountable nouns made plural (informations, advices), agreement when the subject sits far from its verb (The number of students who apply to universities have increased), two sentences joined with a comma — reading for meaning glides straight over them, and Step 4 is only as accurate as your eye. The fix is to stop proofreading in general and start searching in particular. Keep a list of the errors that come back in marked essays, and in Step 4 search for those patterns one at a time. Reading the sentences in reverse order also helps, because the argument stops carrying you forward.
Two weeks out there is time to change one habit, not four. Write two Task 2 essays under time on different question types — an opinion question and a two-part question, say — and run all four passes on both. The criterion that comes out lowest in both essays is the one to work on; a criterion that is low in only one may simply reflect that question. Build your personal error list from the two Step 4 passes. Then rewrite one paragraph from each essay fixing only that criterion, write a third essay at the end of the first week, and check whether that verdict has moved.
Three days out is not the time for new structures or vocabulary lists, because unfamiliar material is where new errors come from. Write one timed essay and run only two checks: Step 1, to confirm every part of the prompt gets its own paragraph, and a search for the errors on your list. Then practise the prompt map as a two-minute planning step you can do on the question paper itself, before you write a word. Walking in with that habit protects the criterion that most often costs a band.
A criterion that keeps coming back at 6 is a pattern, and why am I stuck at band 6.5 in IELTS writing sets out the usual causes. Then compare your verdicts with an outside score, criterion by criterion.
A second opinion is most useful exactly where it disagrees with you, so read the disagreement by criterion rather than by total.
The outside score is lower on Task Response or Lexical Resource. Start from the lower score. These are the two criteria self-assessment inflates in a known direction — intentions read into the page, ambitious words assumed to be precise. Go back to Step 1 or Step 3 and look for the paragraph or phrase the lower score points at. Usually it is there.
The outside score is lower on grammar and names specific sentences. Check them against a grammar reference. If they are wrong, they belong on your personal error list — they are errors you did not see.
Your self-check is lower than the outside score. Careful writers often mark themselves harshly on cohesion and grammar. Do not simply adopt the higher number: upgrade only if the evidence for a 7 is actually on the page.
The two are a full band apart on the same criterion. The essay is probably sitting on the boundary, and best fit could place it either way. Write another essay and check again rather than trying to settle the question with one script. The essay that looks like a 7 but is marked 6 is the subject of my essay looks band 7 but scored 6, which marks one essay both ways, criterion by criterion.
Whichever way it runs, both numbers are estimates made against the public descriptors, not official bands. What they can do before the test is tell you which criterion to spend your remaining time on.
How can I check if my IELTS essay is band 7 before the exam?
Mark the four criteria separately rather than the essay as a whole. For each one — Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy — find a specific sentence of your own that meets the band 7 wording before you give yourself a 7. A general impression of the whole essay almost always comes out too high.
Is self-assessment against the band descriptors reliable?
It is useful but not neutral. It is most reliable on Grammatical Range and Accuracy and Coherence and Cohesion, where you can count things on the page. It is least reliable on Task Response, because you read your own intentions into the essay, and on the errors you have made for so long that they look correct to you.
How many essays should I check before the test?
Enough to see a pattern, not one. Two timed Task 2 essays on different question types, checked the same way, will show whether the same criterion comes out lowest both times. One essay can be a bad day; the same low criterion twice is a habit.
What should I do in the last three days before the IELTS writing test?
Stop adding new structures and vocabulary, because new material is where fresh errors come from. Write one timed essay, check only that every part of the prompt has its own paragraph, and search the essay for the errors on your personal list.
If my self-check says 7 and an outside score says 6, which should I trust?
Start from the lower score and look for the sentence it points at, especially on Task Response and Lexical Resource, which are the criteria self-assessment inflates most. If the lower score cannot be tied to anything on the page, write another essay and check again rather than arguing with one result.
Are the band estimates on this site official?
No. They are estimates made against the public band descriptors. Only a certified examiner produces an official band.
All descriptor wording quoted here is from the public Writing band descriptors updated in May 2023, published by IELTS and the British Council. The statement on Task 2 weighting is from IELTS writing test resources.
Bandly grades your essay or letter against all four criteria and shows the gap to your target band, sentence by sentence.
Task 1 counts once, Task 2 counts twice, and the average is reported on a half band. Here is the arithmetic, worked through, and where it stops.
Your essay looks band 7 against the public descriptors but scored 6? The gap is in the qualifier words self-marking skips. One essay, marked both ways.