TOEFL Academic Discussion — Band 5 (Climate Action)

Prompt

Your environmental science professor has posted the following discussion question, with two classmate replies already visible. This is the same setup you will see on the real test, covered in detail in our 2026 Academic Discussion guide.

Professor Okonkwo:
Universities across many countries are debating whether climate literacy belongs in every degree, not just environmental science programmes. Some argue that the climate crisis is a civic issue on the scale of basic numeracy, and that no graduate should leave a university without engaging with it. Others argue that mandatory courses crowd out specialised study and that climate content can be integrated where it is genuinely relevant.

For this discussion: should every undergraduate, regardless of major, be required to complete one sustainability or climate-action course before graduation? Justify your position with reasoning your classmates can engage with.

Priya:
I support the requirement. Climate literacy is now a basic civic skill. A future accountant, lawyer, or nurse will face climate-related decisions in their work, and a single course gives them the shared vocabulary to act responsibly. Italy has required climate education in schools since 2020, and the public conversation there has measurably matured.

Marcus:
I disagree. Undergraduate degrees are already overloaded. A music student or a classics major has limited credit hours, and a generic sustainability course will be too shallow to be useful and too removed from their field to feel relevant. Climate content belongs in the disciplines where it has genuine traction.

Instructions: Post a substantive 100+ word reply that engages with at least one of the classmate replies and takes a clear position. Use accurate vocabulary and sentence variety. For pacing, see our TOEFL Writing tips for 2026.

Sample response

Marcus is right that a generic course often feels disconnected, but I think his framing misses a stronger option. Rather than a standalone requirement or no requirement at all, universities should embed a climate-action module inside the existing major, calibrated to the carbon footprint of that field. A petroleum engineering student would do a substantial unit on transition pathways; a classics student would do a shorter module on the climate history of the ancient Mediterranean.

This way, every graduate touches the topic, but the depth scales with how much their work will actually shape emissions. Priya's civic-skill argument still holds, because the shared vocabulary still gets taught. What changes is the relevance, which was Marcus's real complaint. The requirement becomes harder to dismiss as a box-ticking exercise.

For a contrast at a higher level, compare with our Band 6 Academic Discussion sample on remote work, and at the floor of the rubric, the Band 3 sample on sin taxes.

Rubric breakdown

Scored against the four-criterion 2026 rubric. For the full mapping of TOEFL Writing scores to bands and CEFR levels, see our guide to the 1-6 scoring system and the band-to-CEFR reference.

What works in this response

• The new-angle move. Instead of voting for Priya or Marcus, the writer proposes a tiered model that resolves the apparent conflict between their positions. This is exactly what raters reward at the top of the Academic Discussion rubric, as covered in our Academic Discussion strategy guide.
• Concrete contrast inside the proposal. The petroleum engineering versus classics example makes the "scales with carbon footprint" idea immediately visualisable. Specificity beats abstraction at this band.
• Both classmates are named and their arguments are reproduced fairly. Marcus's "real complaint" about relevance is acknowledged, and Priya's civic-skill argument is preserved inside the synthesis. Compare with the Band 5 sin-tax sample for the same engagement move on a different topic.
• Word count sits comfortably in the upper-100s. The 100-word minimum is a floor, not a target, and 130 to 200 words is the comfortable zone for this task type.
• The closing sentence reframes the requirement as "harder to dismiss as a box-ticking exercise", which signals the writer understands why mandatory courses often fail. That kind of meta-comment is the discourse marker of a confident C1 writer.

How this could become Band 6

The ceiling for this response is the slight repetition flagged in Lexical Resource and the one awkward subordinate clause in Grammatical Range. A Band 6 version would vary "requirement / module / course" with synonyms like "general-education credit" or "graduation requirement", and would tighten the "the depth scales with" line into something cleaner like "the depth tracks the field's climate exposure". It would also add one sentence acknowledging a counter to its own synthesis, the way our Band 6 remote-work sample does in its third paragraph. That extra layer of self-critique is the polish that closes the gap between Band 5 and Band 6.