The band scale

IELTS reports on a 0–9 scale in half-band steps. Bandzen estimates on the same scale so its figures are comparable to the ones you are aiming for.

Reading

Your raw score is scaled to 40 first, so a 13-question practice set reports on the same scale as a full test. Then it converts:

Raw score, scaled to 40Band
39 or more9.0
37 or more8.5
35 or more8.0
33 or more7.5
30 or more7.0
27 or more6.5
23 or more6.0
19 or more5.5
15 or more5.0
13 or more4.5
10 or more4.0
8 or more3.5
6 or more3.0
Below 62.5

This is the public Academic Reading conversion. It is currently applied to General Training candidates too, and General Training converts more generously — so a General Training reading band from Bandzen is conservative.

Writing

Four criteria, each given its own band by the marker:

  • Task Response
  • Coherence and Cohesion
  • Lexical Resource
  • Grammatical Range and Accuracy

The overall band is the mean of the four, rounded to the nearest half band. It is not a separate judgement made on top of them, so a report where three criteria are 6.5 and one is 5.0 lands at 6.0 — and the 5.0 is the thing to work on.

Your overall estimate

Where both modules have been measured, an overall figure is the mean of them.

Two modules, not four. IELTS averages all four skills; Bandzen only has two of them, so a Bandzen overall estimate is not directly comparable to an IELTS overall band. It is a measure of your reading and writing.

What a band from Bandzen is not

An estimate, not a score

It is produced by this product from work you did here. It is not an IELTS score, it does not come from IELTS, and it does not predict what you will get on the day. Writing bands in particular come from a language model reading against the published descriptors, and two markings of the same essay can differ.

Read the movement, not the point. One essay half a band above the last is inside the noise. Five attempts trending upward is a signal.