Academic Reading: How the Academic Reading test is marked

The Academic Reading papers contain 40 questions and each correct question is awarded one mark; hence the maximum raw score is 40.
Band scores ranging from 1 to 9 are awarded on the basis of the raw scores.

All IELTS test materials are pretested before being used in live tests, but there are inevitably minor differences in difficulty across the large number of tests administered each year. To equate different test versions, the band score boundaries are set so that all test takers' results relate to the same scale of achievement. This means, for example, that the band 6 boundary may be set at slightly different raw scores across test versions.

Table 1 below indicates the average Academic Reading raw scores achieved by test takers at bands 5-8, showing the number of marks typically required to achieve a particular band score.

Table 1: Average Academic Reading raw scores