What is a ToK essay?

What is a ToK essay?

On the page TOK assessment at a glance the essay was described as a discursive essay of not more than 1600 words, written on one of six prescribed titles (PTs) and referencing examples and arguments in two areas of knowledge that you study in the ToK course.  It is an individual task, which means that you are not allowed to work collaboratively on it. Your teacher may give you practice essays in the course where collaboration is allowed but it is strictly forbidden for the final essay.

The purpose of the essay is to check your ToK thinking and your ability to analyse examples that you are familiar with through your IB studies. Examiners are interested in your own thoughts and whether you can link concrete examples to abstract concepts and ideas; we are interested in how you handle uncertainty and deal with situations that are not black-and-white.  We are not interested in external source material and how other people think about these things. Marks are given for your ideas however much you struggle - in fact we like to see signs of a struggle. The PTs are chosen because they are contestable and answers to them are not obvious.  As long as you are clear, we do not mind that the prose you adopt is not perfect English. Much better that you express your ideas clearly in your own way, even with a bit of a struggle, than the essay is smooth but consists of the ideas of others.  

A note on areas of knowledge

All the PTs ask you to consider two areas of knowledge from the five that you have studied in ToK: Natural Sciences, Human Sciences, History, Mathematics, or The Arts. Optional themes and the core theme do not count as areas of knowledge and these should not play a major role in the essay. There are three kinds of question: those that specify both areas of knowledge you should use, those that specify one of them and allow you to choose the other, and those that allow you to choose both. You will have studied all areas of knowledge in your ToK course, but it may be that you feel more comfortable in some rather than others. You should take this into account when choosing which PT to answer.

At this point we should stress that the essay should be about knowledge. You will notice that the PTs all refer to some aspect of knowledge and you are to think about this aspect in relation to your two areas of knowledge. While this might sound obvious in a ToK course it is surprising how easy it is to slip into a discussion about something that is not knowledge at all. Remember that knowledge is not the same as the world (see What is knowledge?). Knowledge is often a representation of the world, a picture of it if you like, but it is not the world itself. This means that your ToK essay should primarily be concerned with knowledge about the world rather than events in the world itself. This means that when you write about History in ToK you should be writing about historians and how they produce knowledge, you should not be writing about the American Civil War or the French Revolution. These are events in the past - they are in the world - but they are not History as a discipline. A good rule of thumb here is that if you have not mentioned any historians then you are probably writing about the past rather than about History. Similarly if you are writing about human beings behaving in the world, Trump for example, then you are not writing about the Human Sciences. Only when you discuss how psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and economists make their knowledge are you writing about the Human Sciences. This is something we shall return to later.

History as an area of knowledge is often confused with 'the past'. If an essay does not mention a single historian then it is probably NOT connected with the AoK History.
 

The ToK Essay as an exploration of the PT

The ToK essay is a discursive essay. It is intended to tell the reader clearly about some aspect of knowledge as it is expressed in two areas of knowledge. You will need to use examples from your areas of knowledge to string together arguments to support different perspectives in the essay. We expect that there will be at least two perspectives presented through which you explore the PT. An exploration is a process by which you come to understand the issues in the question by thinking with examples and generalising them to develop arguments (see Thinking with examples... ). However, it is not sufficient merely to explore. You are expected to compare these perspectives and come to a conclusion about them. Is one perspective more convincing than the other? Why is this? You are expected to evaluate your perspectives and give an answer to the PT, however tentative. 

As hinted above, we are not looking for a polished finished product. We are not looking for sophisticated English sentences with lots of long words. In fact this kind of essay will not score well. Instead we want to feel that you are exploring the issues through your own examples taken from your own IB subjects. We want you to lay bare your thinking - doubts and all. It is OK to write things like “It is difficult to define what we mean by X”, where X is a key term in the question. Examiners are happy to see that you have doubts or encounter difficulties. What we are interested in is how you overcome them. The aim of the essay is to make your own thought processes visible. The examiner knows that the questions are hard and do not have obvious answers, and therefore, there will be choices that you will need to make about how to proceed. These should be signalled explicitly in the essay.

Because of the exploratory nature of the essay, the tone should be that of an investigation. You should try out your ideas in a systematic way. This will mean that, at least in the main part of the essay, that you should avoid categorical or definitive statements. The word 'if' is important here because it avoids making premature commitments and keeps other options open.

That they essay is your own exploration and should not be a polished finished product means that we must be careful if we bring generative AI models into the process. I shall say more about this below.

The ToK essay is not a research essay

The essay is also not like the Extended Essay. It is not a research essay. In fact, the ToK essay could be written without looking at any external sources at all; you could write it just using your notes taken in ToK class and using examples taken from your 6 IB Diploma Subjects. However, it is likely that there will be one or two facts that you will need to look up that will need proper referencing (see below). But most of the essay will be your own unaided work.  Essays that lean heavily on ‘research’ tend not to score very highly, because the author does not really understand the examples that they use in the essay. This is often very obvious to the experienced reader but not to the author herself because she does not know enough about the subject to know that she is making mistakes (see the Dunning Kruger effect The Methods of the Human Sciences). Essay-help sites should be avoided for the same reason. Make sure that you collect examples and make notes on them throughout your ToK course. 

The ToK essay is NOT a research essay. Examples from the 6 subjects studied in the IBDP should be sufficient for the essay. Unfamiliar examples are rarely effective.
 

Arguments and analysis lie at the core of the ToK essay

So far we have emphasised the importance of examples in the ToK essay - and we develop this idea in the pages that follow. But the ToK essay is about areas of knowledge not about examples. So you will need to choose your examples carefully so that they tell you something about areas of knowledge. This means that you will need to choose examples that are typical of the area of knowledge that you are interested in; the example can be linked to more general or abstract ideas that are characteristic of the aok. We use the word ‘analysis’ in ToK for linking concrete examples to more abstract concepts. This analysis is something that examiners are looking for. 

There are two kinds of link that you will need to make. You will need to link the example to the PT. This means that you will need to take your example apart and find which parts of it correspond to the key terms in the PT. Do not be afraid to make these links explicit in the essay. You should write a sentence with the PT key term at one end and the example at the other. The second kind of link will be to take your example and link it to the methods, (or scope or perspectives etc) of the relevant area of knowledge. We call this kind of link an argument because you are no longer writing about the example but you are saying what is true of the example is also true of the whole area of knowledge. This is called generalising from the example to the area of knowledge. I shall say more about this in the examples pages (Thinking with examples..., Examples, examples, examples!, What makes a good example?).

You will need to develop your argumentation skills. You will need to think logically and avoid logical fallacies (see Core theme: Methods and Tools 2 - argument and syllogisms) and the need to avoid logical fallacies (Core Theme Methods and Tools 3: 10 logical fallacies to be avoided by the modern ToK student). 

Referencing

Although the ToK essay is not a research essay, there may be moments where you need to refer to factual information. Then you will need to cite an external source or authority. This needs to be referenced properly, especially in these days of AI. You will need to learn how to follow one of the standard referencing systems. Harvard is perhaps one of the most widely used systems especially in the humanities, but APA and versions of MLA are also acceptable. Any established referencing system will do, provided it has both in-text citations (surname of author, date and page number) and a list of sources consulted at the end of the essay. We should add that in these days of generative AI there is a special emphasis on including page numbers in in-text citations.

I make a fuss about referencing both with students and teachers. It is not just about following the correct formula - it is about having the right attitude towards hard-won facts in these days of social media and fake news. If we look at the history of human knowledge, it is perhaps true that human beings have produced a huge pile of falsehoods and a tiny collection of facts. Therefore, it is important to take these facts seriously and give them, and their discoverers appropriate recognition.  

A good starting point is to realise that sources that do not have an author or a date of publication are probably not reliable sources for the ToK essay. Think about a court of law. They do not accept anonymous evidence or evidence that does not have a date, time and place. Therefore, URLs only will not do as a reference. It is also important to tell your reader where exactly you use a source that you have quoted in the bibliography. Finally, you should make sure that you have read at least part of all the sources you put in the bibliography. It is academic misconduct to include sources you have not read.

Sources that do not have an author or date of publication are not likely to be good factual sources in the ToK essay. URLs on their own will not do as a reference. It is academic misconduct to include sources you have not actually read.
 

The use of generative AI in the essay

ChatGPT, LaMDA, Claude, LLaMA and other large language AI models are a mixed blessing in a ToK context. At present, the IB accepts a limited use of these models as long as you acknowledge that you have used it. In general the IB lets you use the AI model as a kind of jazzed up google for looking things up. You are not permitted to use it for finding arguments or for writing the whole essay. You can use it to clean up your language. Below I have included some scenarios and indicated what the IB permits. The general principle is that AI should not be used as a substitute for your own thinking. Remember, you are taking a ToK course to improve your own thinking muscles. Using AI in this way is like getting a robot to go to the gym for you.

You are not allowed to present the AI's work as your own of course, you did not write it, but I am not sure that you would want to. In my experience AI tends to produce essays that get a D.