IELTS WRITING PART 2 : EDUCATION and Exams

Education just to pass exams

Hello everyone, I have just started working on IELTS and I aim for 6.5 band overall. Can you give me feedback on my essay so that I know what are my weaknesses and improve them? Thank you <3

Topic: Students should be taught academic knowledge so that they can pass exams, and skills such as cooking and dressing should not be taught. To what extend do you agree or disagree?

Schools are said to be a place where students study academic subjects in order to pass examinations rather than soft skills such as cookery and dressing. While some people advocate the significance of academic knowledge and exams and the fact that there is no need to teach practical skills, I partly agree with this idea.

On the one hand, it is undeniable that studying academic subjects culminates in numerous benefits for students. Firstly, the examination results are essential for the academic record. With good grades, students can have an advantage in the university's entrance exam which considers their academic performance. Another positive aspect of this knowledge is that through academic subjects, students are able to obtain fundamental knowledge used in tertiary education. For example, some undergraduates in Vietnam have to study Microeconomics and Advanced Mathematics which consists of mathematical knowledge taught in high school.

On the other hand, skills such as cooking and dressing also play an indispensable part in students' lives. The greatest benefit of them is that it prevents the degradation of students' life quality. Take students who live far away from their parents as an example. Some of them tend to choose junk food as a substitution for main meals due to their inability to cook. As a result, many of them suffer from obesity at an early age. Furthermore, soft skills also provide students new hobbies to unwind after a rough day at work and at school.

In conclusion, despite the need for academic subjects for standard exams, I believe that skills such as cookery and dressing are of the same importance as core subjects in students' lives.

Normally, the extent essay does not accept a "partly" response because it does not create a clear opinion for your essay. The clear opinion is part of the TA scoring considerations. That is why you are encouraged to pick one side of the essay to support, using descriptive emotional terms. It allows you to show a clear opinion of strength, which will be supported by even stronger reasoning opinions in the next 2 paragraphs. Only the comparative essays allow you to use the "partly" discussion because those essays allow you to discuss both points of view before presenting your own opinion. In an extent essay, your opinion is all that matters from the start, hence the singular opinion based on the strength of your belief in a given statement. When you "partly" agree, you do not really propose an opinion of support. Instead, you try to take the middle ground and prove that both sides are correct. However, you are not allowed to use that response because the instruction only gives you 2 choices for your response, agree or disagree. Note that there is no maybe, no partly, no, perhaps in the response choices. You can only choose a response based on the given choices, you cannot make up your own response choice.

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