IELTS TASK 2: formal academic qualifications VS life experience or personal qualities.

Please help me, i'm about to take the ielts test this weekend but i dont know what my writing level is, im quite nervous about whether i could get band 6 to pass the scholarship T.T, thank you in advance!

TOPIC: Nowadays, some employers think that formal academic qualifications are more important than life experience or personal qualities when they look for new employees. Why in this case? Is a positive or negative development?

Qualities or qualifications necessary for a good career

In this increasingly competitive society, high-level qualifications are considered to be more expected than life experience or personal qualities by some employers when they seek new candidates these days. In my perspective point of view, I believe that this is a negative movement.

There are two factors to explain why recruiters put formal academic certifications as top priorities when recruiting new employees. Firstly, in many professions, a university degree is needed for a specific job. A student has to devote a lot of time and effort to his or her study in order to get a university qualification which somehow prove that this student is a hard-working and persevering person. For instance, a candidate for biology teacher position is required to have a great deal of knowledge at university as well as spend a lot of time to practice and carry out experiments. Secondly, this tendency might be a great way for a recruiter to save time finding top-notch applicants. Selecting the candidates base on common criteria certificates is necessary for screening the good candidates from a large applicant pool before employers find their excellent and right employee. Compared to formal academic candidates who are likely ready to start working, employers may have to spend time on training non-academic applicants how to work properly.

However, I think that this is a negative development and recruiters should consider a mix of factors, including education background, work experience and personalities. Many people decide to work right after school instead of starting tertiary education in order to gain life skills and practical experience. On top of that, after a long time of working in a real work environment, people are also capable of doing most assigned tasks without a formal academic education. In addition, warmth and smiles indicate the type of employee who will work well with others. An unhappy worker takes more time to finish the quest, does only the minimum to avoid being fired while a happy worker finds value in the work they do, and do the best they can to finish it.

In conclusion, compared with qualifications, life experience and personal traits are considered less important criterion for employers to assess potential employees, and I believe that this is a negative progress for the above-mentioned arguments.

Hey Thai, I'd like to tell you not to worry about your score. I have thoroughly reviewed your essay and, based upon the scoring requirements, I can safely tell you that you will get at least a 6 with this type of writing. That is because you stayed on point with your discussions and you managed to remain clear and relevant with your 2 points for discussion. However, there are some points that you need to consider improving upon in order to improve your scoring potential.

The first thing that you have to consider is that when you deal with a direct question essay, of which this particular exercise is one, you should make sure to indicate not only your position regarding the topic, but also the main discussion points you will be presenting. That is because the opening paragraph, which requires at least 2 sentences to represent the prompt paraphrase, you also need to add the discussion outline by indicating your position and the discussion points towards the end of the paragraph. This helps inform the reader as to what the flow of the discussion will be and how it will be presented.

The next thing you have to remember is that redundancies need to be avoided in your presentation. While I understand your desire to increase your LR score, repeating information in the essay will not be helpful because it shows a lack of control with regards to word usage and grammar development. For example, when you said:


The term "perspective" already means point of view. It is a synonym word so when you said "perspective point of view" you created a redundancy in the presentation.

Your body of paragraphs are acceptable and does make valid points. However, you presented too many points in one paragraph which did not allow you to really fully explain the purpose of the paragraph. It would be better if you pick only up to 3 strongest discussion points to present in individual paragraphs so that you can clearly explain your meaning. It is not enough to list discussion points with single sentence explanations. You need to fully explain using a topic sentence, reasoning, and clear example. All of those 3 points need to be interrelated in the paragraph with the final sentence being an introduction to the upcoming discussion topic in the next paragraph.

Overall, you did acceptable work in this essay. It shows that you have the potential to score even greater in the actual test. You just need to practice writing in the various forms to make sure that you will get at least a 6 in all the test question formats.