IELTS Opinion Essay Sample: A Band 8 Answer With the Thinking Shown

An opinion essay asks what you think. That sounds like the easiest question in Task 2, and it is the one where the most marks disappear, because candidates spend their time deciding what is true instead of deciding what is easy to argue in 250 words.

Below is a complete answer, the five minute plan that produced it, and the three positions available on any opinion prompt. The band label in the title is a teaching label showing what a strong answer looks like, not a mark awarded by a qualified examiner.

The question

Task 2. Some people believe that schools should teach students practical skills such as cooking, budgeting and basic repairs, rather than focusing only on academic subjects. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Write at least 250 words.

The sample answer

There is a growing view that the school timetable should make room for everyday competences such as preparing meals, managing money and carrying out simple household repairs. I largely agree with this position, although I would argue that practical instruction should sit alongside academic study rather than replace any part of it.

The strongest argument for teaching these skills is that no other institution reliably does. A generation ago, most young people learned to cook or to budget at home, from a parent who had time to show them. In households where both adults now work long hours, that transmission has quietly broken down, and a student can leave school at eighteen having studied literature for twelve years without once being shown how a bank account works. Financial illiteracy in particular carries a measurable cost later in life, since the young adults most likely to accept an expensive loan are those who have never had the arithmetic of interest explained to them.

There is also an argument from engagement. Students who struggle with abstract subjects often discover, in a workshop or a kitchen, that they can do something well and finish it. That experience of competence tends to carry back into their academic work rather than compete with it.

The objection is that school hours are finite, and every hour given to budgeting is an hour taken from mathematics or science. This is a real constraint, but it assumes the two are equivalent in cost. Practical skills can be taught in relatively few hours, because they are procedures rather than bodies of knowledge, and much of the content overlaps with subjects already on the timetable. Percentages taught through a loan agreement are still percentages.

I therefore agree that practical skills belong in schools, provided they are added carefully rather than substituted for academic study.

298 words.

The plan behind it

The essay above came from five minutes of planning that looked like this.

1. Decode the question. Two parts hide in the prompt: should schools teach practical skills, and should this happen "rather than" academic subjects. Answering only the first half caps Task Response, because half the question is unanswered.
2. Choose a position. Partial agreement, because the "rather than" gives an obvious thing to push back on while agreeing with the main claim.
3. Two reasons. No other institution teaches these skills now. Practical work builds a sense of competence.
4. One example each. The bank account and the loan for the first. The workshop for the second.
5. One objection and the answer to it. Time is finite, but the two are not equal in cost.

Five lines, written in the margin of the question paper. Everything in the finished essay is in that list, and nothing in the essay is outside it.

The three positions you can take

Every opinion prompt offers exactly three, and they are not equally easy to write.

Partial agreement wins most often because the essay has somewhere to go. You have a genuine tension to resolve, which produces the comparison and evaluation that the band descriptors reward.

It also carries the biggest risk. "Partly agree" is only a position if you say which part and how much. An essay that agrees a little with everything and commits to nothing has not answered the question, and Task Response marks that as sitting on the fence.

The test is simple. Read your introduction. If a reader cannot finish the sentence "this writer thinks schools should ..." from it alone, your position is not clear enough yet.

What the sample is doing, criterion by criterion

Task Response. The position appears in sentence two of the introduction and is repeated in the conclusion in different words. Both halves of the question are answered, since "alongside rather than replace" directly addresses the "rather than" in the prompt.

Coherence and Cohesion. Four body moves, one per paragraph: main argument, secondary argument, objection, answer to the objection. The links are ordinary words doing structural work, such as "There is also an argument from", "The objection is that", and "This is a real constraint, but". None of them is "Moreover" or "Furthermore". Adding more linking words does not raise Coherence and Cohesion, and overusing them lowers it.

Lexical Resource. "Everyday competences", "transmission has quietly broken down", "financial illiteracy", "bodies of knowledge". These are precise rather than rare. The essay never uses a word it would struggle to use again correctly in the next sentence.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Mixed structures: a relative clause, a conditional in "provided they are added", a participle opener, and a short sentence at the end of a long paragraph for emphasis. Range means variety of accurate structures, not length.

The examples question

Notice that the essay contains no statistics. "Financial illiteracy carries a measurable cost" is a claim about the world, and the sentence after it explains the mechanism instead of citing a number.

Invented figures such as "studies show that 68% of graduates" do not add credit and they read as invented. An example in Task 2 exists to make an abstract argument concrete, and a plausible specific situation does that job as well as a citation would.

Do this before your next opinion essay

Take one prompt and write only the introduction, three times, once for each of the three positions. Two sentences each, so six sentences in total. Then choose the one you would find easiest to defend for four paragraphs, and only then start writing.

Most weak opinion essays are not badly written. They are essays whose writer had not decided anything by the time they reached paragraph two.

Once you have a full answer, you can put it into Bandly for an estimated band on each of the four criteria along with the sentences behind each judgement, which is a quicker way to find out whether your position really came through than reading it back yourself.