How IELTS is structured
IELTS has four sections taken in one sitting: Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking. Listening, Reading, and Writing run back-to-back in about two hours and forty minutes; Speaking is a short face-to-face interview with an examiner, taken the same day or within a few days. Listening and Speaking are the same for Academic and General Training, while the Reading and Writing tasks differ (Academic uses academic texts and a chart-description task; General Training uses everyday texts and a letter).
There's no pass mark and nothing to fail — every section produces a band, and your overall band is the average. That's a different mindset from DELE: you're not clearing a single bar, you're being placed on a scale, and the institution you're applying to decides which band on that scale is good enough.
How IELTS is scored
Each of the four sections is scored from 0 to 9 in half-band steps (6.0, 6.5, 7.0…), and your overall band is the average of the four, rounded to the nearest half band. Listening and Reading are marked from an answer key. Writing and Speaking are judged by trained examiners against four published criteria each — for Writing, things like task response, coherence, vocabulary range, and grammatical accuracy.
Because the overall band is an average, a weak section drags the whole result down — and many institutions also set a minimum per section, so a 7.0 overall with a 5.5 in Writing can still fall short. As with every exam here, the lesson is to find your weakest skill early. IELTS itself states there is no exact CEFR-to-band conversion, so treat the mapping below as orientation, not arithmetic.
| CEFR level | IELTS band (approx.) | Often used for |
|---|---|---|
| B1 | 4.0–5.0 | Foundation / pathway programs · Programas de acceso |
| B2 | 5.5–6.5 | Most undergraduate admission; many work visas · Admisión de grado; muchos visados de trabajo |
| C1 | 7.0–8.0 | Competitive universities; professional registration · Universidades competitivas; colegiación profesional |
| C2 | 8.5–9.0 | Rarely required · Rara vez exigido |
Academic or General Training?
Pick the version your destination accepts. IELTS Academic is the usual requirement for university study and some professional registration; IELTS General Training is for work and migration routes (for example, Australian and Canadian PR). The CEFR alignment of your band doesn't change between them — a 6.5 is the same place on the scale — but you must sit the version your institution or visa stream names. Always confirm both the version and the minimum band with the official source, since requirements change.