Problem-solution essays rarely fail because the English is weak. They fail through mismatch — three problems described, one thin solution bolted on, or solutions to problems the essay never established. The current Task Response descriptor is built to catch exactly this. Band 6 reads:
"The main parts of the prompt are addressed (though some may be more fully covered than others)."
That bracket — some may be more fully covered than others — is the official description of a lopsided essay. Band 7 removes the bracket:
"The main parts of the prompt are appropriately addressed. A clear and developed position is presented."
A causes-and-solutions prompt has two main parts, and the descriptor rewards covering them in proportion — not three paragraphs on one and a sentence on the other.
The failure: solutions that answer nobody's problem
The classic broken essay: paragraph one lists unemployment, boredom, closing schools — paragraph two offers "governments should invest more in education." Which of the three problems does that solve? The essay never says — two lists that never touch.
The fix is mechanical: every solution in your essay should name the problem it answers. If a solution cannot be traced to a cause you established, it is padding.
What the test actually calls this task
The official Academic format page defines Task 2 like this:
"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 General Training page lists example topics including "how environmental problems can be solved". Neither page names "problem-solution" as an official essay category — the labels you see everywhere (opinion, discussion, problem-solution) are coaching vocabulary, not IELTS vocabulary. What defines the task is the wording of the prompt in front of you: if it asks for causes and solutions, those are the "main parts" the Task Response descriptor expects.
The prompt
Written by us in the test's style — not from a real paper:
Small towns in many countries are losing their young residents to large cities. Why is this happening, and what can be done to encourage young people to stay?
Two main parts: causes and solutions. The response below runs about 280 words — over the 250 minimum. The town, the mill, and every number in it are invented for this essay.
The essay
My grandmother's town of Karvi, in southern Estonia, has lost almost a third of its under-30s since the timber mill closed in 2019. In my view, young people leave places like Karvi for two connected reasons — work and study — and any workable solution has to answer those two reasons directly.
The first cause is the concentration of employment. When Karvi's mill shut, roughly 300 jobs disappeared and nothing replaced them, so a school-leaver's only realistic employers are now a supermarket and the town council. The second cause is education: the nearest university is in Tartu, 140 kilometres away, and once an eighteen-year-old has spent three years there, their friendships, part-time work and eventually their career are all in the city. Leaving, in other words, is not one decision but two — first for a degree, then for a job — and each makes the other harder to undo.
The solutions should match those causes one for one. To the employment problem, the most promising answer is remote-work infrastructure: Karvi's council recently converted part of the old mill into a subsidised co-working space with fibre internet, which lets graduates keep city salaries while paying village rents. To the education problem, regional governments could fund satellite campuses or subsidised weekly transport, so that studying in Tartu no longer requires moving there at eighteen — the age at which the town currently loses people for good.
Neither measure will refill Karvi's school by itself. But because each answers a specific reason for leaving, together the two give a young person something Karvi has not offered since 2019: a reason to stay.
Read against the four criteria
Per the official scoring page the criteria are Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy — "The criteria are weighted equally and the score on the task is the average."
Task Response. The prompt's two main parts get one full paragraph each — causes in paragraph two, solutions in paragraph three: "appropriately addressed", in proportion. The position ("any workable solution has to answer those two reasons directly") appears in sentence two and returns, developed, in the final paragraph — Band 7's "clear and developed position".
Coherence and Cohesion. Band 7 wants "a clear progression throughout the response", with "A range of cohesive devices including reference and substitution" that "is used flexibly". "The solutions should match those causes one for one" ties paragraph three back to paragraph two by reference, and "To the employment problem... To the education problem..." labels each solution with its cause — the cohesion does argumentative work, not decoration.
Lexical Resource. The vocabulary is specific because the situation is specific — "subsidised co-working space", "satellite campuses", "school-leaver". The descriptors punish the opposite at the low end: Band 4 flags "inappropriate use of lexical chunks (e.g. memorised phrases...)", Band 3 "over-dependence on input material or memorised language". Nothing here could have been prepared in advance — none of it survives a change of prompt.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Band 7: "A variety of complex structures is used with some flexibility and accuracy." The essay mixes short declaratives ("The first cause is the concentration of employment.") with longer subordinated sentences ("once an eighteen-year-old has spent three years there, their friendships... are all in the city") — range shown through contrast.
The sentences that only work here
- "has lost almost a third of its under-30s since the timber mill closed in 2019" — a dated, quantified opening no other prompt can borrow.
- "Leaving... is not one decision but two — first for a degree, then for a job" — an analysis of this trend, not a transferable formula.
- "converted part of the old mill into a subsidised co-working space" — the solution reuses the essay's own detail, the mill: problem-to-solution stitching in a single noun.
- "the age at which the town currently loses people for good" — only lands because the eighteen-year-old first appeared in the causes paragraph.
Why the template essay is a dead end
If a paragraph works for every problem-solution prompt, it works for none — a pre-built solutions paragraph produces exactly the lopsidedness Band 6 describes, because it was written before the problems were. And Band 0 is reserved for cases including:
"where there is proof that a candidate's answer has been totally memorised."
No band is assigned to the sample above — band scores come from a trained examiner rating a real script under test conditions, and there was no examiner in the room when this was written. What you can check for yourself is the mechanism: two causes established, two solutions traced back to them, nothing left dangling.
What actually costs you
- Listing problems in one register and solutions in another, with no sentence connecting them.
- A solutions paragraph written before test day — the descriptors name memorised language at Bands 4, 3 and 0.
- Answering only half the prompt's question — causes without solutions, or the reverse.
- Vague agents: "the government should take measures". Which government, doing what, for whom?
- Coming in under 250 words — the format pages say plainly you "will be penalised".
Try one
A worked example shows the mechanism — only writing one shows whether you can run it in 40 minutes.
[Write a marked Task 2 →] — one full task, marked, no card required.