Research transparency
IELTS Research and Data Methodology
What we publish from our practice data, what we have withdrawn, and the standard any finding must meet before it appears on this site.
What we publish today
Published
- Live activity counts: practice essays submitted and registered profiles.
- How each practice score is produced, and its limits.
Not published
- Pass rates, or the share of learners who reach a target band.
- Claims that a study method or feature causes score improvement.
- Typical or guaranteed timelines to reach a band.
Publication standard
A finding from our data is published only when all six conditions are met. Until then, the page states that nothing is published.
Frozen, versioned dataset
Inclusion and exclusion rules are documented and fixed before the analysis runs.
Practice scores kept separate
Platform practice scores are never mixed with, or reported as, official IELTS results.
Learners, not essays
Paired learner-level analysis; repeated essays by one person are not counted as independent people.
Human-examiner check
Validation against human-marked samples, with sample size, agreement statistics and limitations.
Reproducible numbers
Calculation code, confidence intervals and a stated method for handling missing data.
Privacy review
Results are anonymised and aggregated so that no individual learner can be identified.
What public numbers mean
Activity totals shown on this site count platform records. They are operational counts, not evidence that any study method improves scores.
Fields in the public statistics endpoint
- essaysAllTime
- Practice essays submitted, all time
- essaysLast7d
- Practice essays submitted in the last 7 days
- usersAllTime
- Registered profiles
The counts are cached and refresh about once an hour.
Responsible interpretation
Practice scores are estimates
AI-generated practice scores are feedback for learning. They can differ from an official IELTS result.
Not examiner-awarded
A practice score should never be presented as an examiner-awarded or official band score.
No fixed timeline
Progress depends on language background, starting level, practice conditions, feedback quality and test-day performance. No timeline can be guaranteed.