IELTS academic task 1 - Destination of UK graduate and postgraduate students.

Prompt:The charts below show what the UK graduate and postgraduate students who did not go into full-time work did after leaving college in 2008. Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The bar charts provide data on what the students (graduate and postgraduate) of the UK, who did not get into full time work did upon graduation in 2008.

Overall, the number of graduate students fell into all four categories (part-time work, voluntary work, preferred to study further, and unemployed) were significantly greater, in contrast to postgraduate students.

The number of graduate students who preferred to study further were ten times higher (around 30,000) than the number of postgraduate students (around 3,000) who preferred to do the same after graduating. Likewise, highest number of students (above 15,000) who ended up doing part-time jobs upon graduation were also graduate students. The number of post graduate students who did part-time jobs was around 2500.

In terms of unemployment, over 16,000 graduate students were unemployed, whereas only one tenth of postgraduate students (around 1600) were unemployed after graduation. Interestingly, volunteering work, on the other hand, was the least preferred stream of work by both the graduate and the postgraduate students.

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Number of words = 166.

I have a few questions regarding this task. I'm highly skeptical of my performance as I took more than 30 minutes to come up with an answer, since I found the chart to be too simple to describe. I kept rewriting the answer in order to meet the task requirements.

1. Is it just me or is it true that the chart is too simple?

2. I've read from various websites that one must not include their opinion while writing task 1, how true is that?

3. Is there another way to answer this task? If so, could you please tell me how?

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Your questions:

1. There is some variety in prompts for these questions, but although this is one of the simpler ones, it definitely seems realistic.

2. I would agree, the point is to describe the data. Make sure not to include any information that is not included in the data, but if the data leads to a conclusion that can be inferred I think that is good to include.

3. I think overall your answer focused too much on numbers instead of proportions. If I just read your report without looking at the chart, I would think for instance that graduate students are much more likely than postgraduates to continue their studies, since the numbers are so much higher. But that is misleading because overall, there are so many more graduates than postgraduates, that their numbers will be higher for every single category. In reality, further study is the most common destination for both postgraduates as well as graduates.

Here are a few more suggestions:

Overall, the number of graduate students [falling] into all four categories (part-time work, voluntary work, preferred to study further, and unemployed) were significantly greater... {maybe say the patterns for each category were similar, but overall, there were many more graduates than post graduates}

...

... whereas only one tenth of postgraduate students (around 1600) were unemployed after graduation. {this isn't really correct - I think you mean the number of postgraduate unemployed was one tenth of the unemployed graduates} Interestingly, volunteering work, {I think volunteer work is more natural} on the other hand, was the least preferred stream {"stream" seems a bit odd here] of work by both ...