"Discuss both views and give your own opinion" is the instruction people half-obey. Half discuss both views and never commit — half argue from sentence one and grant the other view a single grudging line. The instruction contains three jobs — view one, view two, your position — and most essays visibly do two. The current band descriptors (updated May 2023) make that expensive. Task Response at Band 6 begins:
"The main parts of the prompt are addressed (though some may be more fully covered than others)."
A view you skimmed, or an opinion never quite stated, is a main part not addressed — on a task that "contributes twice as much as Task 1 to the Writing score" (official format page).
The failure
Treating "discuss both views" and "give your own opinion" as alternatives rather than a list. The essay that closes with "in my opinion, both sides have merit" has not given an opinion — it has described a stalemate. The essay that opens "I completely agree" and grants the other view one concessive sentence has not discussed both. Either way a main part is thin — the exact unevenness the Band 6 wording flags.
The task, officially
The official Academic format page:
"In Task 2, you are given a point of view, argument or problem which you need to discuss."
"You need to write at least 250 words in about 40 minutes."
The three-part "discuss both views and give your own opinion" instruction is question-paper wording — the official format pages describe Task 2 only in these general terms.
The prompt
The prompt is ours — written for this page, not taken from any real IELTS paper:
Some people believe that sport for children should be competitive, with matches, scores and rankings. Others believe it should be purely cooperative, with no winners or losers. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.
The essay
Every name, score and detail is invented for this essay — deliberately, as explained below.
People disagree about whether children's sport should rank children into winners and losers or remove scoring altogether. I would argue that both sides are right about different ages — cooperative formats should come first, with open competition introduced later.
Those who oppose competition point to early dropout. My nephew Tomasz, who is nine, refused to go back to his swimming club in Katowice after finishing last in a timed gala in front of the other families. What brought him back was a scoreless skills circuit his coach ran the following month, where the only target was his own previous time. For this camp, the purpose of sport before secondary school is simply to keep children moving — and a scoreboard works against that.
Supporters of competition answer that defeat teaches what friendly games cannot. When Tomasz's school football team lost 6–1 to a neighbouring school last October, the players asked their coach why — and spent the next three Saturday sessions practising defending corners, something no casual kick-about had ever pushed them to do. On this view, a result gives children a reason to improve and a safe place to practise losing.
My own position is that these arguments describe the same child at different stages. At seven, Tomasz needed protection from public failure — at nine, he needed the 6–1 defeat. Clubs should therefore run cooperative, self-referenced formats for younger children and introduce leagues and rankings in the final years of primary school, once a child's wish to keep playing is secure.
In short, children's sport should become competitive rather than start that way — competition is a tool to introduce, not a founding principle.
Read against the four criteria
This page will not put a band on the essay — a band comes from a trained examiner rating a real script, and no examiner has seen this one. Here is where each criterion looks.
Task Response. Band 7 asks for main parts "appropriately addressed" and, crucially:
"A clear and developed position is presented."
View one gets a full paragraph (the gala, the skills circuit), view two the same (the 6–1 defeat). The opinion is stated in the first paragraph — "both sides are right about different ages" — and developed, not merely repeated, in the fourth. No part is a token gesture.
Coherence and Cohesion. Band 7 wants ideas "logically organised" with
"A range of cohesive devices including reference and substitution is used flexibly but with some inaccuracies or some over/under use."
The essay refers back without recycling nouns — "For this camp", "On this view", "these arguments describe the same child". That is reference and substitution, not a "Firstly / Secondly" scaffold.
Lexical Resource. The most instructive current-descriptor line is a negative one, from Band 4:
"There may be inappropriate use of lexical chunks (e.g. memorised phrases…)"
The essay's vocabulary is welded to its topic — "a scoreless skills circuit", "self-referenced formats", "a safe place to practise losing". None of those would survive transplantation into an essay about, say, remote work.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Band 7:
"A variety of complex structures is used with some flexibility and accuracy. Grammar and punctuation are generally well controlled, and error-free sentences are frequent."
Range means structures doing real work: a fronted cleft ("What brought him back was…"), a reduced relative clause ("something no casual kick-about had ever pushed them to do").
The sentences you cannot reuse
Tempted to memorise it? Look at what would have to survive into your exam answer: Tomasz, aged nine, a Katowice swimming club, a timed gala, a 6–1 defeat, three Saturdays on defending corners. Every sentence that makes the essay persuasive only works for this prompt. That is what "developed" ideas look like — and why good sample answers make useless templates.
The descriptors are blunt about the extreme: Band 0 is for a candidate who
"did not attend or attempt the question in any way, used a language other than English throughout, or where there is proof that a candidate's answer has been totally memorised."
What transfers from a sample is the architecture: one paragraph per view, a concrete case for each, an opinion stated early and developed late. The bricks you make fresh, every time, from the prompt in front of you.
What actually costs you
- Discussing both views without ever landing on one — the opinion is a main part too, and one that surfaces only in the conclusion is hard to call "developed".
- A one-sentence concession posing as the second view — "some may be more fully covered than others" is limitation language, not praise.
- Under length — "You must write at least 250 words and will be penalised if your answer is too short" (format page), which also penalises off-topic and notes-or-bullet-point answers.
- Memorised paragraphs — see the Band 0 wording above.
Try one
Reading a discussion essay is not writing one. Write yours against a real 40-minute clock and see which of the three jobs you skip.
[Write a marked Task 2 →] — one full task, marked, no card required.