I ve spent two years building AI scoring for IELTS, and I still don t have a clean answer to this.
Here s where I ve landed so far. Some parts of the rubric are mechanical and a model handles them well: word count, task coverage, paragraph structure, grammatical range, whether the response actually answers the prompt. Reading and Listening are trivially checkable there s a key.
the per-question explanations for reading and listening sound genuinely useful, honestly that part usually kills me more than writing. one thing though, would be great if you could add a weekly progress tracker or something that shows my band score trend over time, like a small graph based on all the practice tests i take. would make it way easier to see where i'm actually improving and where i keep stalling