The IB Internal Assessment: What It Is and How to Help Without Over-Helping

Internal assessment is the part of the IB Diploma that families understand least and worry about most. It is coursework, produced during the two years, marked by the student's own teacher, and then checked externally. It carries real weight in every subject. It is also the part of the programme where the boundary between supporting your child and doing the work for them is easiest to cross without noticing.

What Internal Assessment Is

Every Diploma subject includes at least one piece of assessed work completed outside the final examinations. The form varies by subject: an experimental investigation in the sciences, a mathematical exploration, an individual oral in languages, a historical investigation, a portfolio in the arts. What they share is that the student chooses the focus, works on it over an extended period, and produces something individual.

The proportion of the subject grade that internal assessment carries differs between subjects and is set out in each subject guide. In every case it is significant enough that a weak piece of coursework limits the achievable grade, and a strong one provides a cushion before the examinations begin.

How It Is Marked and Moderated

The subject teacher marks the work against published assessment criteria specific to that subject. The school then submits a sample of marked work to the IB, where external moderators check whether the school's marking matches the standard. If the school has marked generously or harshly, the whole cohort's marks may be adjusted accordingly.

Two things follow from this. First, a teacher cannot simply award a favourable mark, because the moderation process would catch it and the adjustment would fall on every student in the school. Second, the assessment criteria are public. Students can read exactly what is being rewarded, and the strongest work is usually produced by students who did so at the start rather than at the end.

Authenticity is taken seriously. Students are normally required to confirm that the work is their own, supervisors confirm the same, and schools use text-matching software. Academic misconduct findings can affect the award of the Diploma itself, not merely the piece of work.

Where Students Actually Lose Marks

The losses are rarely about intelligence. They are about scope, timing and criteria.

• Choosing a research question too broad to answer properly within the word limit.
• Choosing a topic where the data or sources turn out not to be available.
• Describing what was done without evaluating it, which loses marks in almost every subject's criteria.
• Ignoring the criterion on personal engagement or reflection, which is often the easiest to satisfy and the most frequently skipped.
• Leaving the write-up until after the investigation is cold, so the reflection is vague.
• Running out of time and submitting a draft, when the criteria reward revision more than initial brilliance.

What Parents Can Usefully Do

The useful contributions are almost all organisational or conversational rather than academic. Your child's teacher is the authority on content and on the criteria; you are the person who can notice that no work has happened for three weeks.

1. Ask to see the deadline schedule at the start of the year and put the milestones somewhere visible at home.
2. Ask your child to explain their research question aloud and to say why it is answerable. If the explanation rambles, the question is too broad.
3. Ask what the assessment criteria reward, and let your child tell you. If they cannot, that is the next task.
4. Notice the gap between the investigation being finished and the write-up beginning, and ask about it before it becomes a month.
5. Help protect the time, particularly in the weeks where several subjects have deadlines close together.
6. Read for clarity only if your child asks, and comment on whether you understood it, not on how to fix it.

If you find yourself explaining the content of the work to your child, you have crossed from support into authorship. The moderator will not know, but the grade usually shows it anyway.

The Line You Should Not Cross

Editing sentences, restructuring an argument, supplying analysis, or writing sections is not permitted, and it is also counterproductive. Work polished by an adult reads inconsistently against the rest of a student's output, and teachers who have taught your child for a year notice. More importantly, the internal assessment is a rehearsal for the independent work of a degree. A student who has had it done for them arrives at university without the skill.

The same caution applies to tutors. A tutor who explains a concept, helps a student understand the criteria, or coaches the process of narrowing a research question is doing legitimate and useful work. A tutor who supplies the analysis is exposing the student to an academic misconduct finding. If you engage external support, be explicit about that boundary at the outset, and ask the school what it considers acceptable.

One reassurance. Internal assessment is designed to be completed by an ordinary sixteen-year-old with normal teaching support. The students who do well on it are usually not the most brilliant in the cohort but the ones who started early, chose a narrow question, and read the criteria before writing rather than after.