Back to School so time for some reports...

There is always so much going on at the beginning of the academic year, it's easy to forget, or typically postpone, having a look at the subject report for last May's examination session. The good news is that IB have just published these (on the Programme Resource Centre) so it is worth putting a read of the report on your “to-do” list.  There's a lot of material that's included so they are documents that are worth returning to on more than one occasion. 

If you find you really don't have time, do not worry.  Over the coming weeks and months we will be working our way through the subject reports for the different time zones, seeing what lessons can be learned for future candidates and sharing our thoughts on the site. There is, however, one very important piece of information contained in each report that should fix standards for the lifetime of this syllabus.  It is on page 3 and it is the new grade boundaries for the IA.

The grading for IB diploma is criteria based as opposed to norm based.  This means each exam has its own grade boundaries set by the senior examining team.  The question writers try to produce papers that do not vary in difficulty from year to year but sometimes questions prove to be harder, or easier, than the writers thought. Any such variation is taken into account by an adjustment of the grade boundaries for that paper to ensure that standards do not vary from year to year.  The individual grade boundaries are then combined to produce an overall grade boundary for that examination. 

The criteria for the awarding of marks in the Internal Assessment are specified in the Physics guide.  As these criteria do not change from year to year, then there is no reason for the grade boundaries to change.  Thus we can expect the IA grade boundaries published in the recent subject reports to stay the same for at least the next five years.

Going into the previous May 2025 session, it could be argued that the changes that were introduced to the IA might have effected the grade boundaries that used to be in place.  On the one hand, the criteria are clearer and easier to apply suggesting that students might find it easier to achieve high marks on the IA.  This might have been an argument for the grade boundaries to go up.  On the other hand, the current version gives more weighting to the difficult skills of conclusion and evaluation suggesting that students might find it harder to achieve high marks on the IA.  This might have been an argument for the grade boundaries to go down.

In the end, the grade boundaries have remained exactly as for the previous syllabus. These boundaries can, of course, be shared with your students and are the same for HL and SL. They are:

For grades 4 and above, if you divide the student mark by 3, the answer (to one sig fig) is the grade. 

If you have any particular questions or comments about the IA, or indeed any of the papers in any of the time zones, feel free to post a comment to this blog and we will do our best to address the issue you raise.