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Task 2 · Opinion (agree or disagree) · Technology

Whether employers should monitor everything staff do

An agree-or-disagree essay on workplace surveillance, where the band 9 answer argues that intrusive monitoring fails on its own terms rather than merely being unfair.

The question

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task. Write about the following topic. Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.

Employers are now able to record everything their staff do on company computers. Some people believe that employers should be free to do this. Do you agree or disagree?

A 250-word discursive essay — the half of the paper that carries two thirds of the marks. This prompt is original, written in the standard format for teaching purposes — it is not taken from any past paper.

What separates the three answers

The 6.5 and 7.5 both answer on fairness. The 9 accepts the employer's ownership argument entirely and defeats the practice on effectiveness instead, which is a much harder position to argue against.

The three answers

Band 6.5

254 words (the task asks for at least 250)

The answer works. It addresses the task, the reader follows it, and the meaning survives — but ideas stay general, linking is mechanical, wording repeats, and small errors are visible throughout.

The answer

In the modern era, the technology is allowing the companies to see everything which the employees are doing on the office computers. Some people are saying that the employers should have the full freedom to do this monitoring. I do not fully agree with this, because the workers also have the right of privacy2.

On the one hand, we can understand the employers. The computers and the internet connection are belonging to the company1, and the company is paying the salary for the working hours. If some employees are wasting the time on the social media or on the shopping websites, the productivity is going down and the company is losing the money. Also, the monitoring can protect the important data, because sometimes the employees are stealing the information and selling it to the competitors.

On the other hand, too much monitoring is creating a bad atmosphere in the office.4 The employees are feeling that nobody is trusting them, and because of this the stress is increasing day by day. Moreover, sometimes people are using the office computer for the personal messages, for example to their family or to the doctor, and reading these messages is not fair for them. Everybody is needing some private space also, even in the office.

In conclusion, I think the employers can do some monitoring for the security reasons, but they should not read the personal messages of the employees, and they should tell the employees that the monitoring is happening. So the freedom should not be full.3

What an examiner notices

  1. 1. Grammatical range and accuracy

    “The computers and the internet connection are belonging to the company”

    'Belong' is stative and cannot take the continuous. Nearly every verb in the essay is put into the continuous, which is its clearest single marker.

  2. 2. Lexical resource

    “the workers also have the right of privacy”

    'The right to privacy' is the collocation. The idea is then never developed into anything more precise for the remaining three paragraphs.

  3. 3. Task response

    “So the freedom should not be full.”

    The position arrives in the essay's final five words, after three paragraphs that could have supported either answer.

  4. 4. Coherence and cohesion

    “On the other hand, too much monitoring is creating a bad atmosphere in the office.”

    The whole distinction between acceptable and unacceptable surveillance rests on 'too much', which is never defined anywhere in the essay.

One honest caveat

Band labels here describe what each piece of writing demonstrates against the four published assessment areas, paraphrased in plain language. They are teaching illustrations produced for this site, not official material, and no sample has been marked by a test provider. Real scripts are marked whole; two answers with the same label can still look quite different from each other, and nothing on this page can promise anyone a particular result.

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