Ielts writing task 2 - Knowledge gained from personal experience and from classroom instruction

It has been said that: ''Not all learning takes place in the classroom''.

Compare and contrast knowledge gained from personal experience and with knowledge gained from classroom instruction. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?

People often say that not all knowledge is gained from learning in the classroom but also can be derived from personal experience . In my perspective , although both have their own pros and cons , knowledge obtained from experience still seems to be more important .

On the one hand , joining lectures helps us know about academic knowledge of every aspects . These knowledges are actually the products of many experimentions and reasonings passed down from previous generations that is often hard to be fully acknowledged just via studying in classes . Besides , school's lessons orient ourselves in terms of learning direction and also lead us to comprehend the essence of things due to its in-depth theoretics .

On the other hand , learning from experiencing personally is indispensable to every learners . To be more specific , it is considered primary for people to achieve their goals in the future , though graduating from school is the basis of having a job , it is still their experience that helps them in properly dealing with many situations in real life . Therefore , people get less confused when facing with those cases compared with those who just learn in the classrooms . Moreover , it is personal experience that enables people to have a clearest vision and picture of things gained from theoretical classes .

To sum up , to be truly knowledgeable , people must acquire knowledge from both actual life and school instruction . However , they need to apply their knowledge by practicing more and more in real life cases .

The writer missed the point of the discussion. While his perspective tries to covers the general assessment or public perception of the given discussion point, he neglected to reflect on his personal experience as required by the discussion instruction. If he reviews the writing instruction, a clear reference to his personal perspective, based on personal experience can be found in the statement:


The reference point is basically asking: "How do you learn best as a person? Are you academic or life experience based by nature?" This is a personal assessment based discussion. That is what the writer missed out on representing in the discussion.

Aside from that missed point, the writer also did not do a good enough job of restating the given topic. It is so close to the original statement that it will definitely be scored based on cut and paste or memorized writing, which not be good for his TA score.