Put the current official Fluency and Coherence descriptors side by side and the band 6/7 line is one sentence wide. Band 6:
"Able to keep going and demonstrates a willingness to produce long turns. Coherence may be lost at times as a result of hesitation, repetition and/or self-correction."
Band 7:
"Able to keep going and readily produce long turns without noticeable effort. Some hesitation, repetition and/or self-correction may occur… However, these will not affect coherence."
Both bands hesitate. Both self-correct. The difference is whether the thread of the answer survives it — and no part of the test stresses that thread like Part 3, because Part 3 is the one section built from questions you cannot have rehearsed.
What Part 3 actually is
From the official format page:
"In Part 3, you and the examiner discuss issues related to the topic in Part 2 in a more general and abstract way and, where appropriate, in greater depth."
It lasts 4–5 minutes — a discussion between you and the examiner, not a monologue. The questions grow out of whatever your Part 2 task card was about: a card about a repair becomes questions about why people repair things, a card about a river becomes questions about how cities use water. Same territory, zoomed out from your life to people in general.
The failure this page prevents
Treating Part 3 as a quiz with correct answers — and shutting down when you don't have one. The give-away is the one-line answer: a question about society, met with a single sentence and a full stop, leaving the examiner to do all the work of restarting the conversation. Each dead end hands back the floor before you have produced the "long turns" that both band 6 and band 7 Fluency are built on — "able to keep going" is where both descriptors start.
"I've never thought about that" is the test working
Part 3 questions are, per the official wording, "more general and abstract" than your Part 2 topic — which means the honest first reaction to many of them is that you have no ready-made opinion. That is not a malfunction. A question you have genuinely never considered is the one kind of question that cannot be answered from memory — and forming a position out loud, in English, while someone listens, is precisely the performance being sampled.
Coaching, not official doctrine: stop hunting for the "right" answer, because the criteria — "Fluency and coherence, Lexical resource, Grammatical range and accuracy, Pronunciation", each carrying equal weighting per ielts.org — contain no criterion for having correct opinions. Reasoning aloud towards a position you didn't have ten seconds ago is a perfectly good answer. Changing your mind halfway through, out loud, is a perfectly good answer.
One question, answered twice
Our Part 2 page uses an original practice card — "Describe a small repair or fix you did yourself." Here is an original Part 3 question that could naturally follow it (ours, not an official past question):
Do you think people repair things less than they used to? Why might that be?
Answer A — the dead end:
Yes, I think so. People just buy new things now.
Answer B — a developed position:
Yes, definitely less — my grandfather resoled his own shoes, and I don't know anyone my age who would even try. I think the main reason is price, actually. When a new kettle costs less than an hour of a repairman's time, repairing feels almost irrational. Having said that, it's not the whole story — I fixed a tap myself last year and the part cost almost nothing, so sometimes the barrier isn't money, it's that nobody taught us these skills any more.
No band for either — no examiner heard them, and a transcript cannot carry Pronunciation. But read them against the descriptor wording quoted above:
Fluency and Coherence. Answer A never becomes a long turn at all — there is nothing for coherence to survive because there is nothing to cohere. Answer B is one continuous turn that keeps going through a position, a reason, and a concession, with the connective tissue — "actually", "Having said that", "so" — doing visible work. The current Band 7 wording credits "flexible use of spoken discourse markers, connectives and cohesive features"; Band 6 gets "a range" of them "though not always appropriately". Flexibility only shows up when the turn is long enough to need it.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy. The official public descriptors quoted on this site cover Fluency and Pronunciation in detail — we won't invent Speaking grammar-descriptor lines we haven't verified. What is plainly visible without them: Answer A contains two simple sentences and no opportunity to show range. Answer B's structure — a comparison, a conditional-flavoured "when… feels", a concession — exists because the idea has structure. Develop the position and the grammar follows — you cannot bolt complex sentences onto a one-line thought.
Notice also what makes Answer B unstealable: a grandfather who resoled shoes, and a tap the speaker actually fixed — which is the Part 2 story resurfacing as evidence. Your Part 3 answers can lean on your Part 2 material, because officially the topics are linked.
When your mind is blank
Coaching again, labelled as such. A short holding phrase — "That's not something I've thought about before, but I suppose…", "Off the top of my head…" — buys the seconds your brain needs and keeps the turn alive rather than surrendering it. Vary them and mean them.
The honest caveat: a filler recited identically before every single answer stops being fluency and starts being a script — and the official-adjacent line on scripts is IDP's:
"The examiner will be able to tell if you have memorised your answers and this may influence your final band score."
One rehearsed opening phrase deployed six times in five minutes is exactly the pattern a trained examiner notices. The safe version of this advice is a small, rotating set of phrases you would genuinely say — not one incantation.
And a standing honesty note: no official raw-score-to-band table exists for Speaking — those exist for Listening and Reading only. Any site scoring your practice answers to a decimal is guessing.
What actually costs you
- One-line answers — both band 6 and band 7 Fluency start from "able to keep going".
- Hunting for the "right" opinion — correctness appears in none of the four criteria.
- Panicking at an unfamiliar question instead of reasoning towards a position out loud.
- The same recited filler before every answer — memorised language "may influence your final band score", per IDP.
- Ignoring your Part 2 material — the discussion is officially built on that topic.
Try one
[Try a Speaking task →] — one full task, marked, no card required.