SL Examiners report 2022

It is highly recommended that you and your department read the examiners report after an exam session, because it gives you a real insight into important aspects of what examiners observed and, more importantly, what they were looking for. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a cause of some frustration that the examiner's report often offers a level of clarity that it would have been nice to know about beforehand! That said, often when I think I have found a surprise, I will cross reference the syllabus and find parts of it I had missed or not quite paid enough attention to. Either way, and pragmatically, the report offers us important guidance for the next classes we take through. The reports are not long documents and are easy to find on MYIB on the course home page under the heading ‘subject reports’. What follows in this blog post are some highlights that caught my attention and some things I want to take note of myself to fine tune my understanding of the syllabus for my SL apps students. Please accept this for what it is and go and read the full reports for yourselves.

Internal Assessment

Throughout my time as an IB teacher, there has been a sustained attempt to develop Internal Assessment into a truly meaningful exercise that produces a variety of original explorations in which students are properly and fruitfully engaged. This is an admirable aim and I am happy to be part of it. The reality is quite challenging though, especially given the range of students who take the course. I am a practising teacher, and human, so I don't mind saying I was a little upset by some of the language in the report. My students did mostly as I expected, but I accept that the most useful thing to do with it is take away things that might help our students to do better all round. So here goes....

Mechanical maths studies style projects - A running theme for the report is some derision for the staple statistics project of maths studies students of old! I can get animated about this, but will try to contain myself. Having spent a lot of years teaching the maths studies course and a lot of the students for whom mathematics was a real challenge for lots of reasons, these statistics projects were often the most relevant experience students had. Whilst it could be easy to tire of very similar looking applications of correlation and the like, I always reminded myself that students were doing this for the first time. It is made clear here that these types of projects are frowned upon and it is really important that we understand this as teachers. Examiners are looking for something different and it is up to us to model that for students and help them to do it. Have a look at our  New 'Exploration' Internal Assessment that compares the exploration criteria to the old Maths Studies criteria by marking projects with both.

Textbook style applications - This is another phrase that is used in the report. For me it is another unfortunate phrase. When I see a student explore an area of interest to them and then apply some of the mathematics we have learned on the course to it, I see it is a clear victory for the goals of teaching this course and am not sure how else I want them to apply it other than the way I, or the textbook taught them to do so. I think, reading between the lines, that the message is really that examiners were often not convinced that students had shown much independent thought. There is also a reference to “contrived reasons for interest”. This is almost certainly true in lots of cases, but there is a whole range of students taking this course. For many, this is already a significant achievement, even if it only scores 10/20. The message here is that work that appears a bit mechanical is unlikely to score highly. The challenge for us as teachers is to switch the emphasis to try and get our weaker students to do simpler things that lend themselves to greater engagement and originality. 

Long, manual Calculations - There are a number of references to unnecessary long and manual calculations of statistics and a very clear statement that students are not expected to show any of the calculations by hand. This makes sense and it is helpful to have it written down. I am likely to quote this in my annotations next year! 

Words and Symbols - There was a remark about how candidates should avoid explaining mathematical processes in paragraph form and should show these processes in notation form only. When I first read this I gasped having spent so much time encouraging students to use words in the mathematical explanations, because the words can help them show the reader that they understand what they are doing and what the result is showing. On second reading though I can see that this is still true, but this is mostly an appeal against unnecessary words that clutter what mathematical symbols can communicate more efficiently. I can see this point and will be dwelling on that this year.

On balance - As I said, please read it yourselves and make it your objective to take away a few clear points that you can actually employ to help your students produce work that will fit the criteria. I am always happy that my students have had a useful experience in the spirit of the aims and philosophy of the course and this helps me sleep at night! Next though it is really important to keep a sustained focus on making it fit the criteria, all of which are honourable aims too. Like most of us out there, I will experience some frustration which I might need to let out, but this is always followed by constructive thinking about what I can do to make all of this better all round. Here are five points I will make a priority for this year….

1. Aim to provide students with more good examples of ideas that might make good internal assessments with a greater focus on those that are not in the ‘maths studies’ mould.
2. Upgrade the student writing guide to take into account lots of the points made in this examiners report.
3. Do some early moderation with colleagues using some of last year's work to look for advice I would give the students retrospectively. 
4. Encourage more students to take on explorations that involve experimental data collection, taking care to make sure there is genuine interest.
5. Try to model good mathematical communication, with an effective combination of words and symbols, when we look at exploration type tasks in class.

Don't forget to make sure you are familiar with our  Internal Assessment section and the  Internal Assessment Center - For students . get a good look at our  How is it marked? pge that elaborates on the mark scheme

External Assessment

It is helpful to read the examiners' reflections on each of the individual questions. It can point out weaknesses that you have not noticed. Mostly though, as with Internal assessment, the main goal is to take some points that you can use to develop your teaching for the next year.

Probability distributions - This has been on my mind a lot. The point is about helping students to recognise questions that they might try to answer with probability analysis (tree diagrams, laws of probability etc) or those that involve analysis with probability distributions. I notice that I have to take a second to think clearly. This is a clear point for my teaching this year. Have a look at  The glass bridge game for getting our heads around the binomial distribution.

Hypothesis tests - Similar to the above, I think there is more work to do to help students distinguish between these tests so that understanding of the null and alternative hypotheses follows. See this page on  SL Hypothesis testing at a glance to help!

Real rate of investments - There is a clear statement that the preferred method for ‘real rate of return’ is to simply subtract the inflation rate from the nominal interest rate. This is helpful. I’ll confess I still wrestle with some of these calculations. With my colleagues we see levels of complexity that are not addressed and so it becomes quite important to hold on to simple solutions like this.

Voronoi Diagrams - I have enjoyed teaching and exploring these. It has taken me a while, though, to recognise that, mostly, these questions rely heavily on coordinate geometry which will have to play a bigger part in my teaching this year.