Examples of teacher-marked IA reports
Five teacher-marked IA reports
Introduction
I have already included two exemplar IA reports on this site. The first, IA example & marking exercise, is a report that was added before any students had submitted genuine IA reports (the first of these were submitted for the May 2106 examination session). This was given as an exercise to give teachers practice in marking and to see how much agreement there was between subscribing teachers in the way they applied the assessment criteria. The second, A genuine example of a moderated IA report, is an actual report submitted for the May 2017 session which had been moderated down considerably by the IB when it was sent as one of the requested samples for moderation. I recommend you read both of these pages as they will give you a good insight into how to apply the assessment criteria correctly.
This page contains five more genuine reports together with the marks awarded by the school. One of the reports was sent as a sample for moderation, the other four were not. However the school’s moderation factor was ‘spot on’, i.e. none of their students' marks in the whole cohort were moderated up or down, so the teachers’ marks are either exactly, or very close, to the IB standard of marking. Even so please bear in mind that these are not ‘official’ IB marks. Why they are interesting is that you can see from the comments written on the reports how the school has internally moderated the marks as more than one teacher has been involved in the process.
The five sample reports
I’ve labelled the samples as A, B, C, D and E. Four of them are based on primary data obtained in the school laboratory, the fifth is based on secondary data obtained from other sources. The title/research questions are:
A: Is there a comparison between the activation energy of 2-bromo-2-methylpropane (when reacted in an SN1 reaction with sodium iodide) and the bond enthalpy of the carbon-bromine bond involved in the reaction?
B: Which are more effective, inorganic catalysts or enzymes?
C: The effect of chain length on the enthalpy and efficiency of primary alcohols compared to alkanes.
D: Oxidation of ethanol in white wine.
E. Bond angle analysis – How do the bond angles of certain compounds differ from the predictions modelled from VSEPR Theory when certain functional groups are added? – Specifically looking at the effect of substituted halogen atoms on the geometry of methane.
The school, the individual teachers and the five students who wrote the reports have all given me permission to reproduce them here on the understanding that they are anonymous. If you would like to try to mark them blind yourself to compare how you mark with the teachers' marking then I have included a clean copy of the reports. You can then, if you wish, click on the 'eye'* to reveal a copy annotated with the teachers’ comments together with a breakdown of the marks awarded for each of the five assessment criteria as well as the total mark and corresponding grade.
*If you are accessing this page as a free page (rather than as a teacher from a subscribing school) then the 'eye' will not work but you can also access all five reports with the teachers comments and breakdown of marks by clicking here.
Note that, unlike the moderated sample page, I have not given my own comments.
Sample A
The marked IA report together with the total mark out of 24 and the grade for Sample A is given below.
Sample B
The marked IA report together with the total mark out of 24 and the grade for Sample B is given below.
Sample C
The marked IA report together with the total mark out of 24 and the grade for Sample C is given below.
Sample D
The marked IA report for Sample D is given below. The breakdown of marks is: Personal engagement 1/2, Exploration 4/6, Analysis 2/6, Evaluation 2/6 and Communication 2/4 giving a total mark of 11/24 which is a Grade 4.
Sample E
The marked IA report for Sample E is given below. The breakdown of marks is: Personal engagement 2/2, Exploration 5/6, Analysis 5/6, Evaluation 3/6 and Communication 4/4 giving a total mark of 19/24 which is a Grade 6.