Students in many countries are encouraged to travel or work for a year before starting their university studies. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages for young people who decide to work or travel after finishing high school and starting education in a university. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Sample Response
In today’s worldtoday's modern world, many students are planning to continuefurther their studies immediately after they finish school. However, there are a handful of people who assert that teenagersyoung teenagers should be given a chance to travel or work for at least one year before attending universitybefore they really attend a university. Thus, it is important for us to examine both the positive and negative effectsestablish both the positive and negative impacts on young people who plan to go on a trip or start to work before starting their tertiary education.
Undoubtedly, there are numerous benefits when young people work or travelbenefits if young people were to work or to travel around the world after they finish school. To begin, working or travelling helps students gainhelps the students to gain precious life experience that is not available in textbookslife experiences which are not available on textbooks. To illustrate, when young adults start workingcome out to work before attending a university, they are actually being offered a valuable opportunity to comeget into contact with others. It is crucial for them to develop interpersonal skills which play an indispensable role in their studies and their prospective jobs. In addition, if they planned to goif they were planned to go on a trip worldwide, they would, unquestionably, learn about the cultures and traditions of the locals which may be slightly or totally different from theirs. This indirectly widensIt, indirectly, widen their horizons and may help them to reduce culture shockreduce the experience of culture shock when they arrive in a new place in the near future.
Nevertheless, a coin always has another side. If they decide to work or to travel for a year, they may graduate later than their peers. Recent research conducted in Columbia has shownThe statistic of recent research conducted in Columbia has shown that students’ memorising and interpreting abilitiesmemorising and interpreting abilities of a student deteriorate as they grow older. In other words, it means that they are highly unlikely to achievelikely highly not to achieve their aspirations due to the continual weakening of the mental abilitiesmental abilities of their brains. Besides, they may have forgotten the foundationshave forgotten about the foundation of certain subjects that they have learnt in secondary school. Again, it will probably lead the students who start their tertiary education late fail to gain success in their academic performances.
In conclusion, although there are both benefits and damaging consequences if they travel abroad or work after they finish school, I believe every individual can still strivestrive hard and achieve their set goals regardless of life experience and age. Our nation will continue to prosper and flourish in the decades to come if more educated and knowledgeable generations are being raised up.
Why this response received Band 6.5
The response gives a substantial discussion of how a gap year can build interpersonal and cultural awareness while delaying graduation and weakening academic readiness. Its main limitation is that the required personal position remains vague: the conclusion says students can succeed regardless of age or experience without clearly supporting or opposing the gap-year encouragement. The highest-priority improvement is to state a direct position and justify it by weighing the strongest benefit against the most credible drawback.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
Advantages and disadvantages are developed with relevant explanation, but the extent of agreement is not made explicit in the conclusion.
State clearly whether a gap year should generally be encouraged, discouraged, or recommended only under defined conditions.
Coherence and Cohesion
The essay progresses logically through an introduction, benefits, drawbacks, and conclusion, with clearly focused body paragraphs.
Make the final paragraph synthesise the preceding comparison rather than introducing the broader, loosely related idea of national prosperity.
Lexical Resource
A reasonably wide vocabulary supports the discussion, but recurrent awkward collocations and overstated phrasing reduce precision.
Use natural expressions such as gain practical experience, broaden their horizons, lose study habits, and return to education.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A range of complex structures is attempted, but agreement, conditional, article, verb-pattern, and sentence-construction errors occur regularly.
Check conditional consistency and verb complements, especially forms such as if they plan, helps them broaden, and leads students to fail.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Students in many countries are encouraged to travel or work for a year before starting their university studies. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages for young people who decide to work or travel after finishing high school and starting education in a university. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Your response
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