TOK assessment at a glance
ToK is a course which is widely regarded as being self-rewarding. The skills that students learn in ToK are transferable not only to other IBDP subjects or to future university studies but also to many aspects of life outside the academy. In that sense, there is little need for assessment in ToK - just as a footballer need not be tested in her training regime but in the actual games she plays. However, for practical reasons, there needs to be some light touch assessment in ToK. This page gives an overview.
Why assess ToK?
As you will doubtless realise by now, ToK is a course in creative-critical thinking about knowledge. It has a multi- and inter-disciplinary nature and requires students to ask and answer second-order questions about knowledge. The kinds of skills that are cultivated in the course, such as the ability to work with concepts and link them to real examples in areas of knowledge, to create and evaluate arguments, to express complex ideas in simple language, to handle uncertainty, to make value judgments, to realise that not every opinion is equally likely, all these skills are eminently transferable to other DP subjects, to university studies and to life. For this reason, studying ToK is both hard and self-rewarding. Just by doing ToK students are improving their abilities to perform well in the many kinds of analytical tasks that they will be presented in their lives. For this reason, they are investing in the core of their futures by studying ToK even though they may not realise it at the time, and they will draw upon their ToK experiences for many decades to come.
Therefore, it does not seem necessary to assess ToK at all, and many teachers have made this point over the years. However, there are practical reasons why it is assessed. Non-assessed components, rightly or wrongly, tend not to be taken seriously by schools, students, parents, or universities. Schools tend to put resources into components which appear to have measurable outcomes. Moreover, students are able to take ToK as a standalone subject without taking the whole IB diploma, where the 'multiplier effect' on other subjects may not be measurable. Schools themselves need a metric to make decisions about the effectiveness of teaching and other resource allocation. For these reasons, assessment in ToK is a necessity.
Given these two general kinds of argument, the solution is to go for what is called amongst the senior examining and curriculum teams: light touch assessment. The assessment is not as full and as rigorous as it is with other IB subjects. There are only effectively 1.5 IB points allocated to ToK. The intention is that assessment should not be the main goal of the subject, and while it can be a useful organising device, only a small amount of time is intended to be devoted to it. The Subject Guide recommends that 18 out of the 100 hours be allocated specifically to the preparation of the assessment tasks. In a sense, the assessment tasks can help motivate students and direct their energies toward developing useful skills. It is a (maybe sad) fact of school life that students (and their teachers) tend to need assessment tasks in the background to motivate activities that themselves have intrinsic value. The upshot of this, then, is not to make too much of the assessment tasks but, at the same time, use them as a motivator. Don't spend a whole term on the essay. Don't spend a whole month preparing the exhibition. Instead, get on with a great job of expanding your students' horizons and skillsets by confronting them with the unfamiliar and having them do interesting and challenging assignments that build these skills in a worthwhile manner.
Assessment in ToK is supposed to be light touch. Don't devote a too much time to essay and exhibition! Use regular ToK classes to develop these skills.
In terms of timing, the exhibition is best done at the end of year 1 and the essay at the end of the ToK course halfway through year 2. Teachers should concentrate on the preparation of the relevant skills and put all your firepower as a teacher into what I call 'upstream' activities such as brainstorming, example choice, learning how to put arguments together, learning how to evaluate arguments, learning how different points of view can be constructed and so on. If you follow the advice in these pages the students will need only a week or two to actually write the essay because they will already be thoroughly prepared. The same applies to the exhibition.
Essay materials
It is probably a good idea to become acquainted with the essay task early in reading about ToK. This will influence how you teach your classes (for example, you will realise that it is a good idea to start building an examples database or encourage students to write journal entries in which they can link abstract ToK concepts to examples). We would suggest that you read the page What is a ToK essay? first, and then jump to a discussion of the assessment instrument Understanding the Essay Assessment instrument to give yourself an overview of the essay task. Then, go back to the detailed advice structure later when you need to think about writing tasks to prepare for the essay (The structure of the ToK essay and Essay building blocks). The advice on examples can come next in order to understand the central role of good examples in ToK (Thinking with examples..., Examples, examples, examples! and What makes a good example?) It is a good idea to start students doing small writing tasks from the start of the course so that they get used to the conceptual language of ToK and handling examples. Good luck!
Essay materials teacher access only:
| Essay assessment | Understanding the Essay Assessment Instrument | What are examiners looking for in the essay? |
| Student samples | Commentaries on student essays | This section consists of a growing set of marked student essays with very detailed commentary by a senior member of the examining team |
| Example of a good essay | What does a ten look like? | I am often asked for an example of a 10/10 at workshops. Here is a real one in the flesh! |
| Improving a good draft | What is a 'tweakable' good essay? | Often students produce reasonable first drafts, but they can often be transformed into an excellent essay by applying one or two small ‘tweaks’ read on… |
| 3 teacher interactions | Three teacher interactions for the essay | The three teacher interactions are crucial in the development of the essay. This page describes them in detail. |
| Activities | Essay activities | Students are not born with essay-writing skills. This page lists some activities that students can do throughout the course to develop essay skills. |
| Admin | Administrative procedures: essay | Death, taxes, and admin are the 3 curses of life! This page describes what needs to be done to administer the essay and how it can be done without pain! |
| Previous titles | Comments on previous Essay titles | Here are the private comments on the performance on essay titles from previous years by a senior examiner. These are not available elsewhere! |
| FAQ | FAQ Essay | This page hosts a growing list of FAQs from workshops and other sources. |
Essay materials with student access:
| What is the ToK essay | What is a ToK essay? | Gives a brief description of the essay task and clears up some common misunderstandings |
| The role of examples | These pages show how examples are the core of the essay from which arguments flow. It is worth building skills around examples, such as linking them to areas of knowledge and to the prescribed title. Example choice also needs practice. | |
| Essay structure | It is important to structure the essay in a logical fashion to make it effective. These pages cover the main kinds of structure and the functions of the various building blocks. | |
| Language in the essay | Language for the ToK essay | Clarity is above all the main requirement of language in the essay. There is not point in having brilliant ideas if they are not formulated clearly. This page gives adivce for specific sections of the essay appropriate for the EAL learner. |
| Tools for developing the essay | These pages give advice for practice exercises to acquire relevant essay skills. | |
| Assessing the essay | These pages give advice about the assessment instrument and what examiners are looking for. Here there are examples of student essays with detailed commentaries by a senior examiner. | |
| FAQ | FAQ Essay | Answers to frequently asked questions about the essay |
Exhibition materials
The exhibition is a rather unusual assessment format so the teacher new to ToK is advised to read the introductory page on the exhibition What is a ToK Exhibition before taking a look at the assessment instrument Understanding the Exhibition Assessment Instrument. To cement this understanding, it might then be helpful to read comments by an exhibition moderator on actual student exhibitions Exhibition Commentaries. Since the links between the objects and the prompt are the key idea it is a good idea to read Linking objects to the prompt next. Finally, if you have time, read the remaining pages. Again, it is worth reading about the exhibition early in the process of getting to know how to teach ToK simply because you can integrate elements of the exhibition into your regular classes, for example, by working with objects. You got this!
Exhibition materials teacher access only
| Videos | Exhibition Tips videos | Here is a growing collection of videos focused on particular parts of the exhibition process. |
| Teacher guidance on exhibitions | TOK exhibition: teacher guidance and comments | Here are some detailed practical tips on how to run the exhibition and how to write the comments on IBIS. |
| Admin | Administrative procedures: exhibition | Here is a guide to the admin for the exhibition. |
Exhibition materials with student access
| What is the ToK exhibition? | What is a ToK Exhibition | Gives a brief description of the exhibition task and clears up some common misunderstandings |
| What makes a good object in the exhibition? | TOK exhibition: objects | There has been much worrying about what an object is in the exhibition. The more important question is what makes a good object. |
| The exhibition prompts | TOK exhibition: prompts | The prompts for the ToK exhibition do not change from year to year. This means that experienced teachers and moderators can get to know them quite well. And they are not all equally accessible. Some contain hidden perils... |
| Linking objects to aspects of the prompt | Linking objects to the prompt | Success in the exhibition involves linking the knowledge context of the objects to the exhibition prompt. Objects for which this is difficult or requires too many words are not good objects in the exhibition. This page suggests a neat way for students and teachers to check 'linkability'. |
| Advice on writing the commentary | TOK Exhibition: writing the commentary | While choosing good objects is the key to a good exhibition, the student still has to make the links to the prompt in the commentary. This page shows how this can be done effectively. |
| Teacher comments | TOK exhibition: teacher's guidance and comments | The feedback given by the teacher is important in producing a good exhibition. This page sets out what is allowed and what makes effective comments. |
| Assessing the exhibition | This page shows what it is moderators are looking for and therefore what the teacher should be looking for assessing the exhibition. Example student exhibitions are given with commentaries by an exhibition moderator. | |
| Practicing exhibition skills | Exhibition activities | Here are some activities that can be used to practice exhibition skills, including some fake prompts for practice purposes. |
TOK assessment components
Assessment in TOK consists in 2 tasks:
- essay (external assessment worth 2/3 or the total score)
- exhibition (internal assessment worth 1/3 of the total score)
The essay and exhibition are both marked out of ten but the essay marks are doubled by the IB to provide the final mark, hence the maximum total score is 30. This score is then translated into the A-E scale using grade boundaries set by the grade award teams each session. Although they can change, in practice the grade award teams for the essay and exhibition tend to confirm component boundaries that lead to the following overall boundaries:
E 0-3
D 4-9
C 10-15
B 16-21
A 22-30
But this is not the end! Then, the grade is combined with the Extended Essay grade and translated into 0-3 points for the diploma. To translate the combination of grades into points, the IB uses the TOK-EE matrix. To obtain an IB DP Diploma, the candidate needs to achieve a grade higher than E for both TOK and EE.
What is the TOK exhibition?
The TOK exhibition is, as the name implies, an exhibition of three objects with accompanying commentaries that may, in principle, be put on display for others to view. The exhibition is an individual assessment task - so each student is expected to prepare the exhibition on their own without help or collusion. The aim of the exhibition is to show how TOK manifests in the world around us. The objects and the accompanying commentary should help the viewer understand one of 35 prompts chosen by the student. The commentary is, like an explanation board in a museum, not an essay or set of arguments but rather an explanation of how the objects tell us something about the chosen prompt. The exhibition does not necessarily need to answer the prompt. In this sense the exhibition is quite different to the ToK essay.
The IB recommends that the exhibition is actually physically set up, preferably towards the end of the first year of the IB programme so that it can be viewed by other students, teachers, and other stakeholders in the school, such as parents, governors, and the school board. However, not every school will have the resources to mount a physical exhibition, so a virtual exhibition is also possible. The documentation of the exhibition is assessed by the teacher and samples are sent to the IB for moderation of the teacher's assessment.
The task for the student is to select 3 objects that they can demonstrate links to a prompt chosen from 35 internal assessment prompts in the ToK Subject Guide (page 41). Well-chosen objects will illustrate the prompt or provide possible answers to it. The student then needs to write a short text (c.300 words), putting each object in its context and explaining the link to the prompt. The prompts are effectively high-level knowledge questions and do not change between sessions. The student should provide a pdf file of the texts and the accompanying photographs of the objects which can be used by the teacher to assess the exhibition and can be sent to the IB for moderation purposes. The assessment criteria for the exhibition can be found below or in the Theory of Knowledge guide on page 47. The moderation sample is used by moderators in the IB to assess whether the teacher's marks are reliable or whether they need to be adjusted. Based on the moderation sample, the marks of the whole school cohort may be adjusted.
What is the TOK essay?
The TOK essay is a formal, discursive essay of up to 1600 words written in response to one of the six prescribed titles, which are different for each examination session. The titles are published about six months before the submission deadline. As the exhibition, it is also marked using the assessment criteria that can be found in the Theory of Knowledge guide on page 48.
The TOK essay is an external assessment component, which means all of the essays are assessed by external examiners. It is also one of the early components of the IB (together with Extended Essay and Language A HL essay), which means it is uploaded to the system a month earlier than the other components.
As we shall see below, the ToK essay tests how well students can think about ToK questions and can handle ToK concepts; it is not an exercise in writing beautiful English or using amazing examples taken from outside the student's IB experience. Good ToK essays demonstrate clear argumentation, logical thinking, and draw upon examples students may have encountered during their IB studies.