Off Topic in IELTS Writing Task 2: What the Band Descriptors Actually Say

You walk out of the test and reread the question in your head. The question asked whether governments should fund public transport instead of building roads. You wrote about why public transport is good for cities.

Those are not the same essay. Now you want to know what it costs.

Search this and you will find confident answers that contradict each other. One site says an off topic essay cannot score above band 5. Another says it depends. The public band descriptors, which are published and which anyone can read, are more precise than either, and reading them is the only way to work out which situation you are in.

The criterion that marks relevance

Going off topic is marked under Task Response, the criterion that asks whether you answered the question in front of you. The other three criteria mark how you wrote: Coherence and Cohesion for organisation, Lexical Resource for vocabulary, Grammatical Range and Accuracy for sentences.

This is why an off topic essay can still read well. Your linking words still work. Your vocabulary is still your vocabulary. The failure is in one criterion, and your final Writing band is built from all four, with Task 2 weighted more heavily than Task 1.

So the honest answer to "how much does it cost" starts with a different question: how far off topic, exactly.

Four levels of drift, in the words of the descriptors

The public descriptors for Task Response describe relevance at several bands. Here is what they say, and what each one looks like on the page.

Read those four rows against each other and the picture changes.

Irrelevant detail is a band 5 feature, not a disqualification. If your essay answers the question and one body paragraph drifts into a related point nobody asked about, that is the band 5 wording, and the rest of your performance still matters.

Tangential is the serious one. That is the band 4 wording, and it is the row that describes the transport example at the top of this post. The essay is about the right subject and answers a question that was not asked. Nothing in the descriptors says this caps your overall band at a particular number, but Task Response is where it lands, and Task Response is weighted like the other three criteria inside Task 2.

Completely unrelated is rare. Band 1 means you wrote about something else. In practice this happens when a candidate has memorised an essay on a theme and reproduces it because the question shares a keyword.

A memorised answer has its own line in the descriptors, at band 0, for a totally memorised response. That is worth knowing before you learn a model essay by heart.

Why good candidates drift

Four causes, in the order candidates meet them.

1. Reading the topic instead of the task. The nouns in a question are the topic. The instruction is the task. Some people think museums should be free to enter. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of free entry. The topic is museums. The task is advantages and disadvantages of free entry. An essay about why museums matter has read the nouns.
2. Answering one part of two. Why has this happened, and what can be done? is two questions. Writing four hundred words on causes and one sentence on solutions is the band 6 wording at best, since one part is covered far less fully.
3. Preparing the essay before reading the question. Candidates who have written ten practice essays on technology arrive with paragraphs ready. The paragraphs are good. They answer last week's question.
4. Running out of ideas and filling. This is the most common source of irrelevant detail. You have two reasons and need a third, so you reach for anything on the subject. A short, well developed paragraph is worth more than a long one that has stopped being about the question.

The two minute check that prevents it

The drift is almost always decided before you write your first sentence, which is where it is cheapest to fix.

Take the question and split it in two with a pen. On one side, the topic words. On the other, the instruction words: discuss, to what extent, advantages and disadvantages, why, what can be done, do you agree.

Then write your position in one sentence, and check it against the instruction words only. If the instruction says to what extent do you agree and your sentence does not contain an opinion, you have not answered the question yet.

Here is the same prompt handled twice.

Question. Some governments spend large amounts on public transport. Others argue this money would be better spent on building new roads. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.

Drifted plan. Introduction about congestion in cities. Paragraph one, benefits of buses and trains. Paragraph two, pollution from cars. Paragraph three, the need for better transport. Conclusion, cities should improve public transport.

Every paragraph is about transport and no paragraph is about the choice between two kinds of spending. There is no second view anywhere, and discuss both views was half the instruction.

On topic plan. Introduction, states the choice and my position. Paragraph one, the case for funding public transport, moving the most people for the money. Paragraph two, the case for new roads, freight and regions buses do not reach. Paragraph three, my position and why the first case is stronger in dense cities. Conclusion.

Same subject knowledge, same vocabulary. The second plan answers the instruction.

If it has already happened

If you have sat the test and you know you answered a different question, a remark will not help you. A remark checks whether the marking was correct, and marking an off topic essay down is not a marking error.

What helps is finding out which of the four criteria is actually weakest, because candidates who drift once often assume relevance is their whole problem when their sentences need the work, or the reverse. Rewrite the same essay against the real question, keep your paragraphs as close to the original as you can, and compare the two.

What to do today

• Take your last three practice essays. For each one, read only the question, then write the instruction words on a separate line.
• Check each body paragraph against that line. Mark any paragraph that answers the topic instead of the instruction.
• Rewrite one of those paragraphs so that its first sentence names the instruction. If the question asked to what extent you agree, the first sentence should say how far.
• Keep the two versions. The pair is the lesson, not the correction.

You can paste both versions into Bandly to see an estimated band on each of the four criteria and the sentences behind each estimate, which makes the gap between the drifted paragraph and the rewritten one visible. The bands are estimates from a scoring engine rather than marks from an examiner, so read them as a pointer to the criterion that needs work rather than as a result.