IELTS Writing Remark: How to Judge Your Script Before You Pay

Your Writing band came back lower than every other section. Reading 8, Listening 8, Speaking 7, Writing 6. You need 7. The gap feels like a mistake rather than a result.

IELTS has a process for this. It is called an Enquiry on Results, often shortened to EOR, and candidates usually call it a remark. You pay a fee, a senior examiner marks your script again, and your band either rises, falls or stays the same. Fees are commonly refunded when a band goes up.

The fee and the deadline are set by your test centre and depend on where and how you took the test, so the centre is the only reliable source for both. Sources online disagree about the window, and some quote different rules for computer based tests. Contact your centre the day you decide, not the week you decide.

This post is about the part you can do yourself first: working out whether your Writing answer was likely to have been marked low, or whether it was a band 6 answer.

What a remark actually reconsiders

A remark is a second marking of the same script by a more senior examiner. It is not an appeal, and it is not a negotiation. Nobody reads an explanation of what you meant to write.

So the only question that matters is whether your script, exactly as it stands on the page, supports a higher band on the four public band descriptors:

• Task Response, for Task 2, or Task Achievement for Task 1. Did you answer the whole question, with a clear position, developed throughout.
• Coherence and Cohesion. Is the information organised, is there clear progression, are paragraphs used logically.
• Lexical Resource. Range, precision and control of vocabulary, including spelling and word formation.
• Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Range of structures, and how many sentences are error free.

Your Writing band is built from both tasks, with Task 2 weighted more heavily than Task 1. A strong essay cannot fully rescue a Task 1 answer that missed the question, and the reverse is also true.

The honest self check

You cannot see your marked script. You can usually reproduce your answer, because candidates remember their own argument and structure better than they expect. Write it out again from memory, as close to the original as you can manage, and then read it against the questions below.

Be strict. The purpose of this exercise is to save you a fee and six weeks of waiting if the answer was a 6.

Task Response: did you answer this exact question

This is the criterion where candidates most often lose a band they thought they had earned, and it is also where our own scoring work keeps pointing. Check all of these:

1. Did you cover every part of the prompt? A two part question with one part answered caps Task Response, however good the writing is.
2. Was your position clear in the introduction, the body and the conclusion? A position that appears only in the conclusion is not a clear position throughout.
3. Did you stay on the question, or drift to the topic? An essay about public transport in general, when the question asked whether governments should fund it rather than roads, has answered a different question.
4. Were your ideas developed or just listed? Three reasons in three sentences is a list. One reason with a cause, a consequence and an example is development.

Coherence and Cohesion: can a reader follow it without effort

• Does each paragraph have one central idea, or do two ideas share a paragraph.
• Do your linking words match the logic, or did you write moreover where you meant however.
• Did you use the same linking phrase at the start of every paragraph. Mechanical linking is noted in the descriptors and holds this criterion down.

Lexical Resource: precision, not length

• Count your spelling errors honestly. Spelling sits inside this criterion.
• Did you use a word whose meaning you were unsure of. One wrong collocation in a short answer is more visible than it feels while writing.
• Did you repeat the question's key nouns throughout because you had no alternative for them.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: how many clean sentences

Count your sentences. Then count the ones you are confident have no error at all, including articles, plurals, prepositions and verb tense. The proportion of error free sentences is central to this criterion. Candidates expecting a 7 are often surprised by how few of their sentences are completely clean.

When a remark is worth requesting

There is no formula, and nobody can tell you the result in advance. These are the situations where candidates have a real reason to ask:

The last two rows are the ones worth sitting with. A remark is a check on the marking, not a second chance at the exam.

What to do while you wait, or instead

Whatever you decide, you will probably sit Writing again or prepare as if you will. The useful work is the same either way: find out which of the four criteria is actually holding your score down, because candidates usually guess wrong. People who believe their grammar is the problem often have a Task Response problem, and people who worry about vocabulary often have a cohesion problem.

So rewrite the answer you reproduced from memory, fix the single weakest criterion from the checks above, and compare the two versions side by side. Reading your own two drafts next to each other teaches more than reading a model answer by someone else.

You can also paste either version into Bandly for an estimated band on each of the four criteria and a list of the specific sentences pulling it down. Those estimates come from a scoring engine, not from an examiner, and they cannot tell you what a remark would return. What they can do is point at the criterion to work on, which is the decision in front of you today.