El Forastero wrote:In some countries, young people are encouraged to work or travel for a year between finishing high school and starting university studies. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages for young people who decide to do this.
From a student’s point of view, University studies require differentkind ofskills, behavior and attitudes than are needed in high schools. In other words, a university demands more mature attitudes in potential students to face the specific challenges they are going to findthere. Some youngsters seem to be unprepared to start university studies just after finishing high school and decide to travel instead.
The main advantages this decision offers are related precisely to the opportunity to develop the skills they strongly need in university.
When travelling, people need to manage scarce resources like time and money, they face problems to be solved and challenges to be surpassed, and they need to plan the trip and carefully schedule the activities they need to do. Through this process, they develop autonomy, responsibility, and other emotional skills like stress management, optimism, self-confidence and awareness. In addition, a travel experience can develop interpersonal skills through meeting new people and understand different cultural contexts. All of thislearningswill be very useful to complement academic learning once in university.
Unfortunately,not everything is as ideal as we would like to.this kind of experience hasitsrisks that some people are unaware of. Besides those associated to travelling itself, a lack of conscious thought about the travel purpose can be more harmful than not having the travel experience at all. If youngsters treat the travel as a long holiday period with no responsibility, full of fun, parties, alcohol and debauchery, the whole experience will be meaningless and empty, with no positive effects.
In conclusion, the travel experience can be marvelously rewarding and meaningful, but it needs to be well guided and well directed in order to avoid wasting the opportunity for personal growth.
(280 words, 27 minutes)
My score (I am not an IELTS examiner): 6.5-7
Task response - 7 (over-generalizations, some supporting ideas lack focus)
Coherence and cohesion - 7.5 (minor mistakes with cohesive devices)
Lexical resource - 7 (wide range of vocabulary but some notable word choice problems)
Grammatical range and accuracy - 6-6.5 (a variety of complex structures but frequent minor errors)
Are you familiar with IELTS Simon? His website is a great source of corrections and analysis by an ex-examiner. IELTS-Yasi (the Chinese name for IELTS) is even better, but it's mostly geared toward speaking. Lastly, it's a long shot, but google around for "IELTS Write Right Master IELTS 5." It's written by an ex-examiner and published on the Chinese market, and it's got a lot of really interesting breakdowns of why some specific sentences might get higher scores than others, as well as comparing band 5 and band 7 model essays.