Tips from IB Examiners – An Overview and the Importance of the Subject Reports

If you did not know after each examining session the IB publishes a subject report looking at the specific subject area and feedback from examiners on each of the examined parts of the syllabus. This is available on the OCC hidden away under the Subject Reports tab. It is useful if you are new to the subject to check back a few years and the patterns that exist in terms of student performance.

This May 2013 subject report showed some disappointing trends in that many students did not seem to achieve to their full potential and highlighted three main areas that were of concern :-

1. Student planning of long answer questions in Paper 2 and 3 was often very poor and led student to achieving much fewer points in these sections than they should have done.
2. Internal Assessment – worth 36% of both SL and HL students marks – did not allow students to address all assessment criteria and so students again did not achieve to their full potential.
3. The examiners stated the importance of workshop attendance and specifically face-to-face workshop attendance to understand and share ideas for IA’s. This is of greater importance with the new syllabus for the first examinations in 2016 happening soon. Workshops are already advertised for this new syllabus and teachers are encouraged to go.

In this next posts I will highlight the following areas – tips for the IA’s and Major Project, tips for Paper 1 abd tips for answering the long answer questions well in Paper 2 and 3