Writing Task 2: Advantages & Disadvantages Essay: Question 9
Syllabus W.task2
Newspapers and specialist organisations regularly publish league tables that rank universities against one another using measures such as research output, graduate salaries and student satisfaction.
Do the advantages of ranking universities in these published league tables outweigh the disadvantages?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response
Task Response
The introduction paraphrases the prompt and states a clear, sustained verdict (“I believe the advantages… outweigh the disadvantages”) that is never diluted later. Each body paragraph develops one genuinely distinct, fully extended point (transparency for applicants and accountability pressure on institutions, then the reductive and gameable nature of metrics) each anchored in a specific example, and the conclusion weighs the two sides explicitly (“hundreds of thousands of prospective students” versus “occasionally gaming a handful of metrics”) rather than merely restating the introduction.
Coherence & Cohesion
The essay moves logically from the case for rankings to a fair acknowledgement of their limitations, signposted by “The clearest advantage is…” and “The disadvantages, however, are not trivial.”. Reference chains (“this fact”, “the metrics”, “their statistics”) link ideas smoothly, and the cousin’s example is woven directly into the transparency argument rather than appended separately.
Lexical Resource
Register is consistently formal and precise: “obscure real strengths”, “gaming a handful of metrics”, “pastoral care”. The essay avoids repeating “good” or “bad” by instead varying the evaluation through collocations such as “genuinely complex institution”, “persistent decline” and “narrower problem”.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
A wide range of structures is used with full control: a non-defining relative clause (“a league table revealed that a relatively unfamiliar regional university… had far stronger graduate employment outcomes”), a purpose/result construction (“for instance by admitting students likely to boost…”), and varied sentence openings across all four paragraphs. There are no errors of tense, agreement or article use anywhere in the response.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging band 6 error on this prompt is describing possible ranking criteria neutrally without ever weighing whether the transparency they create genuinely outweighs the risk of universities distorting their own statistics to climb the table.