Most students don't fully understand how IELTS scores work — and that costs them on exam day. Once you understand the math, you can build a much smarter study plan.
The Four Skills and Equal Weight
IELTS tests four skills, each scored from Band 1 to Band 9:
- Listening — 40 questions, each worth 1 mark
- Reading — 40 questions, each worth 1 mark
- Writing — Task 1 + Task 2, examiner-scored
- Speaking — Examiner interview, examiner-scored
Each skill produces a band score from 1.0 to 9.0 in 0.5 increments. These four scores are averaged to produce your Overall Band Score.
How the Overall Score Is Calculated
The four individual band scores are averaged and rounded to the nearest 0.5:
Example: Listening 7.0 + Reading 6.5 + Writing 6.0 + Speaking 7.0 = 26.5 ÷ 4 = 6.625 → rounded to 6.5
Rounding rules: scores ending in .25 round up to .5, scores ending in .75 round up to the next whole number.
How Raw Marks Convert to Band Scores (Listening & Reading)
For Listening and Reading, raw marks (out of 40) convert to band scores roughly as follows:
- Band 9: 39-40 correct
- Band 8: 35-36 correct
- Band 7: 30-32 correct
- Band 6: 23-26 correct
- Band 5: 16-19 correct
The exact conversion varies slightly between exam versions, but this gives you a useful target. To go from Band 6 to Band 7 in Listening, you need roughly 6-7 more correct answers.
Writing Score Breakdown
Writing Task 2 counts for twice the marks of Task 1. Your Writing band score is calculated as:
Writing score = (Task 1 score × 1 + Task 2 score × 2) ÷ 3
Both tasks are scored on four criteria equally: Task Achievement/Response, Coherence & Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range & Accuracy. This means Writing is complex — a weak grammar score can pull down an otherwise strong essay.
What This Means for Your Study Plan
Because all four skills are weighted equally in the overall score, your highest-ROI improvement comes from your weakest skill. If your scores are:
- Listening: 7.5 | Reading: 7.0 | Writing: 5.5 | Speaking: 6.5
Your overall is 6.5. But raising Writing from 5.5 to 6.5 pushes your overall to 6.75 → rounded to 7.0. That same 1-band improvement in Listening (already at 7.5) would take you from 6.5 to 6.75 → still 7.0, but much harder to achieve.
Always identify and focus on your weakest skill first.
Find Your Weakest Skill Fast
Wordly's free diagnostic identifies your specific weak areas across all four IELTS skills — not just which skill, but which question types and sub-skills are dragging you down. Instead of guessing where to spend your study time, you get a personalised plan based on your actual performance.