IELTS Conclusions: What to Do With the Last Ninety Seconds

You have five minutes left. Two body paragraphs are done, your hand is tired, and you still need a conclusion. This is where a lot of good essays lose marks that were already earned.

The conclusion is the shortest paragraph in the essay and the easiest one to plan in advance. It has exactly one job: state your position again, in different words, so the reader finishes the essay knowing what you think. Nothing else belongs there.

What the conclusion is marked on

The conclusion does not have its own band score. It affects two of the four criteria.

Task Response is the criterion that asks whether you answered the question and held a clear position throughout. If your essay argued one thing and your conclusion drifts toward another, that is a wobbling position, and a wobbling position is one of the most common reasons a strong essay stays at band 6.

Coherence and Cohesion is the criterion covering organisation and the logical flow between ideas. A missing conclusion is a structural gap. An essay that simply stops after the second body paragraph reads as unfinished, even when the argument was complete.

So the conclusion protects marks rather than adding new ones. That is why it should be fast.

The three rules

No new ideas. If a reason is worth including, it belongs in a body paragraph where you can develop it. A new reason in the conclusion is an idea with no support attached, and unsupported ideas pull Task Response down rather than up.

No new examples. Same reason. An example that arrives in the last two sentences has nowhere to go.

Different words, same meaning. Copying your introduction and changing two words is visible immediately. Restating the same position with new vocabulary is what the paragraph is for, and it gives Lexical Resource, the criterion covering your vocabulary range, something to reward.

Three conclusions to the same question, marked

Here is the question. It is a standard opinion type, the kind that asks how far you agree.

Some people believe that university education should be free for all students. Others think students should pay the full cost. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.

Assume the essay argued that education should be free at the point of use, funded by general taxation. Now look at three conclusions a candidate might write.

Conclusion A

In conclusion, I think free university education is a very important topic in the modern world. There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides. Governments should think carefully about this issue and make the best decision for their countries.

This is the most common conclusion in the exam and it is close to worthless.

Read it again and ask what the writer's opinion is. There is no answer. The essay argued a position for two paragraphs and then the conclusion refused to repeat it. "Advantages and disadvantages on both sides" applies to any question ever written, which means it says nothing about this one.

For Task Response, this weakens the position at the exact moment the reader is deciding what the position was. The phrase "a very important topic in the modern world" is filler; it would sit equally well in an essay about traffic, or plastic, or homework.

Reading: weak. No position, no content specific to the question.

Conclusion B

In conclusion, I agree that university education should be free for all students. This is because free education helps poorer students to attend university, and because a country with more graduates has a stronger economy. Furthermore, another important point is that many students leave university with very large debts, which prevents them from buying homes later in life.

This one has a clear position, which puts it well ahead of A. The problem is the last sentence.

Student debt and house buying is a new idea. It never appeared in the body paragraphs, so it arrives with no explanation and no example. The reader meets a fresh argument in the final line of the essay and cannot do anything with it.

There is a second issue. The paragraph is now longer than it needs to be, and it was written in the last ninety seconds, which is when handwriting and grammar are at their worst. Every extra sentence in the conclusion is an extra chance for a Grammatical Range and Accuracy error at the point where you have the least time to check.

Reading: mixed. Position is clear, but the new idea is a Task Response problem, not a bonus.

Conclusion C

In conclusion, although charging fees does raise money that universities genuinely need, the cost of excluding capable students who cannot pay is higher. Funding degrees through taxation keeps the door open on ability rather than income, and the graduates it produces repay that investment through the work they go on to do.

This is what the paragraph is supposed to look like.

It acknowledges the other side in the first half of the opening sentence, which shows the reader that both views were genuinely considered. Then it commits, clearly, to one position. It repeats the essay's argument in new language, so "poorer students cannot afford fees" has become "excluding capable students who cannot pay", and "the economy benefits" has become "repay that investment through the work they go on to do".

No new reason appears. Nothing is introduced that the body did not already support. It is three lines and it took under two minutes.

Reading: strong. Clear position, restated rather than copied, and nothing new smuggled in.

A template you can carry into the exam

Do not memorise a conclusion. Memorised sentences are recognisable and they do not fit the question. Memorise the shape instead.

That is two to three sentences and about forty to sixty words. If you are writing more than that, you are probably adding something new.

Useful openings, none of which are memorised content:

1. In conclusion,
2. To conclude,
3. On balance,
4. Overall,

Avoid "in a nutshell" and "last but not least". Both are informal, and informal phrasing in an academic essay affects Lexical Resource because the vocabulary no longer suits the task.

The paraphrasing move, in practice

Restating without repeating is a vocabulary problem, and you can prepare for it. Take your own position sentence and change the grammar, not just the nouns.

Introduction: I believe governments should pay for university education.

Conclusion: The case for public funding of degrees is, on balance, the stronger one.

Notice what changed. "Governments should pay" became "public funding", so a verb phrase became a noun phrase. "I believe" became "the case is stronger", so the opinion is now carried by the sentence structure rather than announced. That kind of transformation is exactly what Lexical Resource and Grammatical Range and Accuracy are looking at, and it costs you no extra thinking time once you have practised it a few times.

What to do today

Take three essays you have already written. Do not write new ones. Cover the conclusion of each and rewrite it in two sentences using the three slots above, giving yourself a strict two minute limit each time.

Then compare your new version with the old one and ask a single question: does the reader know what I think? If the answer is no, the old conclusion was doing nothing.

When you write a full answer, Bandly gives an estimated band for each of the four criteria and explains the reasoning behind each one, so you can see whether your position is reading as consistent from the introduction through to the final line. The bands are model generated estimates rather than an examiner's judgement, so treat them as a guide to what to practise next.