How scoring works
Every score Syllabus gives is an estimate produced by applying an exam board's published band descriptors to your answer. This page explains what that means, and what it does not.
What we mark against
Exam boards publish the criteria their own markers work from. For IELTS writing that is four criteria — task response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy — each with a written descriptor for every band. Syllabus scores each criterion separately against those descriptors and reports the criterion, the band, and the descriptor wording the band came from.
This is the part that practice material usually leaves out. An answer key tells you which items you got wrong. It cannot tell you why a piece of writing or a spoken response was marked where it was, because that judgement lives in the descriptors rather than in a key.
Primary sources
We link the documents we work from so you can read them yourself rather than take our summary of them.
- IELTS writing band descriptors, Task 2 — British Council / IDP / Cambridge
- IELTS scoring in detail — IELTS
- CEFR global scale, Table 1 — Council of Europe
What an estimate is not
A Syllabus score is not an official result. It carries no standing with any exam board, university, employer, or immigration authority, and no board endorses, reviews, or has any involvement in our marking. We are not affiliated with any examining body. Exam names are used only to describe what Syllabus helps you practise for, and remain the trademarks of their respective owners.
Treat the number as a signal about where you currently stand, and the reasoning behind it as the part that helps you improve.
What we will publish
We do not publish an accuracy figure, because we do not yet have one worth publishing. Comparing our estimates against official results requires enough people to have sat the real exam after practising here for the comparison to mean anything. When we have that, we will publish the method and the numbers together, including the cases where we were wrong.
Corrections
If you think a score or an explanation is wrong, tell us and we will look at the specific answer. Write to support@syllabuslabs.com with the exam, the skill, and the answer in question. Where a fault is ours we will correct it and, if it affected other candidates, say so here.