IELTS Writing Task 1 is the part many people practise alone: you write a report on a chart, and then nobody tells you whether it is any good. This is a short comparison of five ways to check a Task 1 report before test day. I built one of them (Band Score Checker), so I have marked it clearly and kept its limits in.
Prices and features checked on 11 November 2026.
What a Task 1 check should tell you
IELTS marks Task 1 on four criteria: Task Achievement (for Academic, did you report the main features and write an overview?), Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. A useful check says which of those four is holding your band down, not just "good" or "needs work".
1. A teacher or tutor
- What you get: a human who has marked real scripts, can see patterns across many of your reports and can say what to change first.
- Cost: varies a lot by country and tutor.
- Limit: slow. Most people can get one report marked a week at best, so you repeat the same slip several times before anyone points it out.
2. A study partner
- What you get: free, and reading someone else's report shows you what a clear overview looks like.
- Limit: a partner at your level misses the same things you do, and cannot tell you a band.
3. The public band descriptors, used as a checklist
- What you get: the official Task 1 band descriptors are public. Turn them into questions: Is there an overview with no figures in it? Are the main features selected, not every number listed? Is each paragraph about one idea?
- Cost: free.
- Limit: you are marking your own work, and most people are kind to themselves. It works best on a report you wrote a week ago.
4. Write and Improve (Cambridge English)
- What you get: free automatic feedback from Cambridge English. It shows your writing a result linked to the CEFR and points to places that may need improvement.
- Limit: it is a general English tool, so the result is a CEFR level, not an IELTS band, and it does not mark your report against Task 1 criteria such as the overview. Good for fixing language, less so for the task itself.
5. An AI band-score checker (the one I built)
Band Score Checker gives an estimated band on all four criteria for an Academic report or a General Training letter, plus the three problems costing the most marks. For Academic Task 1 you upload the chart with the report, so Task Achievement is marked against the chart.
- Price: 1 check a day free without signing up, 2 a day with a free account. A subscription ($7.99 a month) adds every sentence correction and band 8 rewrites.
- Accuracy, with the limits: I tested it on 10 Task 1 reports and letters that have published examiner bands. Its overall band was within half a band of the examiner 63% of the time, with an average gap of 0.65 band, and it tends to score a little low. That is a practice estimate, not a prediction of your test result. The full method is on the accuracy page.
- Not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge.
How I would combine them
- Write the report under time (20 minutes).
- Run the checklist from option 3 on it the next day.
- Get one outside check: a teacher if you can, a checker if you want faster turns.
- Rewrite the weakest criterion only, then check again and see whether the band moved.
If you want a chart to practise on, this bar chart task has a model answer and the comparison language that bar charts need.
Disclosure: I made Band Score Checker. Draft written with AI assistance and edited by me.
Top comments (0)