I recently wrote this band 8.5 essay for a task from Cambridge IELTS Academic 20. The essay was written on a laptop in about 25 minutes, and I then the spent about 15 minutes editing and revising it. No editing apps, AI tools, or dictionaries were used in the process.
Marking was done by qualified IELTS writing trainers, as well as LLMs like Perplexity, ChatGPT and Grok. These AI agents were properly trained using the updated IELTS writing band descriptors and model answers from Cambridge IELTS series of books.
In many countries, primary and secondary schools close for two months or more in the summer holidays.
What is the value of long school holidays?
What are the arguments in favour of shorter school holidays?
In many parts of the world, primary and secondary schools shut down for two or more months of summer holidays following a lengthy school year. Although such a long break may benefit the students in different ways, the advantages of shorter holidays cannot be ignored.
Extensive summer holidays offer pupils a chance to focus on the non-academic aspects of their personal growth. They can spend more time with family and friends, reinforcing relationships and refining interpersonal skills, or reconnect with more time-intensive hobbies and interests such as fishing, camping, or arts that are often abandoned during the hectic school year. A lengthy break from persistent study, daily travel to and from school, and sitting awkwardly in classrooms for hours would also allow students to enjoy comprehensive mental and physical recovery. They would rest and replenish their exhausted minds and bodies - a definite necessity before a new school year begins.
Shorter holidays, on the other hand, would reduce the likelihood of knowledge loss over an extended period away from learning activities. According to modern acquisition models, freshly-acquired knowledge and skills need to be recalled and recycled frequently to become consolidated and internalised. This means long learning gaps can contribute to cognitive regression, while shorter ones would preserve the consistency of the learning curve, preventing such a lapse. They would also ease the reintroduction of students to the academic environment and its rigours. Having been away from learning activities and school assignments for months, many pupils find it fairly taxing to go back. This would not be the case when they return from a break of only a few weeks, which is a blessing for teachers too, as it spares them from having to deal with large groups of unenthusiastic learners.
Personally, I believe the benefits of long holidays, namely personal growth and physical and mental rest and recovery, are unlikely to fully disappear if they are shortened. Students and their teachers would benefit more from multiple shorter breaks that prevent knowledge loss and ease the process of returning to school.
length: 339 words
TR 8-9* | CC 9 | LR 9 | GRA 8
*The essay was assessed multiple times by human and AI markers, and there was some variation in their estimation of TR.
This essay clearly presents the topic in the introduction. Multiple main ideas are presented and explored extensively for each question, and a clear and relevant position is presented in the conclusion.
Cohesion is accurate and rarely attractes attention. Paragraphing is managed logically. Note that the body paragraph on short holidays is relatively longer than the other one, which is quite natural when the writer ultimately takes the side explained in the longer paragraph.
The range of vocabulary is very extensive, and many collocations and uncommon words and phrases have been used naturally and flexibly. The style is consistent and appropriate.
A wide range of grammatical structures, including compound, complex, and compound-complex structures, have been used with flexibility.
There are almost no errors in the use of language throughout the essay.