Can ChatGPT Mark My IELTS Essay? What the Research Shows and a Prompt to Use

The short answer

Yes, ChatGPT can mark an IELTS essay as practice, and it is free to try. Treat the band as a rough estimate. In a 2024 study of 400 Task 2 essays, GPT-4o's scores correlated with the recorded official scores at about 0.71 to 0.72, with a typical error (RMSE) of about 1.05 to 1.13 bands.

That is good enough to spot patterns across several essays. It is not good enough to decide whether one essay is a 6.5 or a 7.

What the studies found

Few studies use real examiner scores, and most tested a specific model version, so results may not carry over to the version you use today.

• Qiu, Yan and Cai (PACLIC 2024): GPT-4o graded 400 Task 2 essays from a public dataset once per prompt. Correlation was 0.71 to 0.72 and RMSE 1.05 to 1.13. Llama-3 scored 0.56 to 0.63 and 0.99 to 1.25 on the same essays, so the choice of model matters.
• Fathali and Mohajeri (Technology in Language Teaching & Learning, 2025): DeepAI rescored 145 Task 2 essays that certified examiners had marked. Mean bands were 6.45 for examiners and 6.25 for the AI, and the difference was not statistically significant. The authors still concluded that replacing human judgment would be premature.
• A similar group average does not mean each essay gets the right band. In that second study, the essay-level differences had a standard deviation of 0.57 of a band.

A prompt you can copy

A vague request such as "grade my essay" invites a vague answer. Give ChatGPT the task, the criteria and a required format. Paste the full question as well, because Task Response cannot be judged without it.

You are marking IELTS Writing as practice. Using the public IELTS Writing band descriptors, give one whole band from 0 to 9 for each criterion: Task Achievement or Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. For each criterion, quote two phrases from my essay as evidence and say what stops it reaching the next band. Then calculate the overall band as the mean of the four, rounded to the nearest half band. List the five errors that cost the most marks, quoting my words with a correction. Do not rewrite the essay. Say that this is an estimate. Task type: [Task 1 or Task 2, Academic or General Training]. Question: [paste]. Essay: [paste].

How to use the result well

• Check the quotes. If a quoted phrase is not in your essay, do not trust that point.
• Check the arithmetic. Add the four criterion bands, divide by four, and apply half-band rounding.
• For Academic Task 1, include the chart data as text. A model that cannot read the visual cannot check your figures.
• Keep the same prompt from essay to essay, then compare trends across several essays and not one score.
• Before relying on a band, get a sample essay marked by a qualified teacher or examiner and compare.

When a dedicated checker is worth using

A general chatbot is enough if you are happy to write and maintain a prompt. A dedicated checker saves that work by applying a fixed format every time. It does not automatically mean a more accurate band, so look for published evidence and how its reference scores were made.

ieltswrites is one such checker. It assesses each criterion separately, calculates the overall band in code, and quotes your essay line by line. In its published test against examiner-marked scripts, the average error was 1.04 bands and it scored strong writing too low, so it is not more accurate by default either.

Common questions

• Is ChatGPT accurate for IELTS band scores? It is approximate. One study found a typical error of about 1.05 to 1.13 bands for GPT-4o against recorded official scores, so use it for trends and not for a single precise band.
• Is it allowed to use ChatGPT to practise for IELTS? Yes, for practice at home. You cannot use it in the test itself.
• Can ChatGPT replace an IELTS examiner? No. Its score is not an official result, and the studies above do not support replacing human examiners.

Sources

• Qiu, Yan and Cai (2024), Large Language Models For Second Language English Writing Assessments: An Exploratory Comparison, PACLIC 38: https://aclanthology.org/2024.paclic-1.36.pdf
• Fathali and Mohajeri (2025), Artificial Intelligence in International English Language Testing System Writing Assessments: https://doi.org/10.29140/tltl.v7n4.103131

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