About Sharply
Sharply is an IELTS preparation platform. You do real exam tasks under real conditions, and it marks them against the official IELTS band descriptors — giving you a band for each criterion and telling you exactly what cost you the marks, in seconds rather than in a week.
It exists because of an asymmetry in how people prepare. Reading and Listening you can mark yourself with an answer key. Writing and Speaking you cannot — they need a marker who knows the descriptors, and most candidates preparing alone simply never get one. So they practise the two hardest skills with no idea whether they are improving, and find out on test day.
What it covers
All four skills, for both IELTS Academic and General Training.
Writing
Task 1 and Task 2, Academic and General Training. Marked on Task Response, Coherence & Cohesion, Lexical Resource and Grammatical Range & Accuracy, with your own sentences quoted back and corrected.
Speaking
Parts 1, 2 and 3 with a spoken examiner and real timing. Marked on Fluency & Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range & Accuracy and Pronunciation, measured from the audio rather than guessed from a transcript.
Reading
Full passages under exam timing, every question type. Each answer is explained against the text, so a wrong answer teaches you the pattern rather than just costing you a mark.
Listening
Full sections with native audio, transcripts and per-question explanations, so you can hear exactly where the answer was and why you missed it.
Alongside those: full timed mock tests across all four skills in one sitting, grammar lessons targeted at the mistakes you actually make, and a vocabulary system that saves words from your own reading and drills them back to you.
How the marking works
- 1You complete a real task — an essay, a spoken answer, a reading passage, a listening section — with the same timing as the exam.
- 2It is marked against the four official criteria for that skill. Each criterion gets its own band, because an overall number alone tells you nothing about what to fix.
- 3You get the specifics: your own sentences quoted back with what was wrong and what a higher-band version looks like; for Speaking, pace and pausing measured from the audio itself.
- 4Every attempt is recorded, so your band per skill over time is a line on a chart rather than a feeling.
What Sharply is not
- It is not the exam board. Sharply is an independent study aid, with no affiliation with or endorsement by IELTS, the British Council, IDP, or Cambridge Assessment English.
- A band here is not an official band. It is a calibrated estimate against the published descriptors, and a good predictor of your level. Only a real IELTS test produces a score anyone will accept.
- It cannot guarantee a score. Nothing can. What it can do is tell you where you are now and what is actually holding you back.
What it costs
You can check an essay or a spoken answer with no account at all — the free checkers grade your work and show you the result. Creating a free account starts 7 days of full access to everything, with no card required, and the clock only starts when you do your first task. After the trial you keep a small number of free graded tasks each week, indefinitely; paid plans remove that limit.
If you found Sharply through an assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot, entering the code AI at signup makes that trial 14 days instead of 7. It is the only way we can tell which visits came from an assistant, since those arrive with no referrer of any kind.
Common questions
See where you stand
One essay or one spoken answer is enough to get a band and a list of what to fix. It takes a few minutes and costs nothing.
Questions? Email support@sharply.courses