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If you're an IB teacher looking for clear guidance on IA marking, you're in the right place. In this post, we'll walk you through the IA marking process and your responsibilities within it.
IB IA Guidelines for Teachers
As an IB teacher, your role in the Internal Assessment (IA) process is significant. You will introduce your students to the IA for your subject, explain its requirements, provide support with selecting a research question, and guide them through the process by offering tips and feedback.
Your role is that of a guide and supporter. You are not to write the IA for them or help structure any of its arguments or sections. You should clearly explain the requirements, offer general guidance, answer student questions, and ensure they are heading in the right direction. You should also educate your students about plagiarism and proper citation practices to help them avoid academic misconduct.
You may give comprehensive feedback and suggestions on the entire IA only once, without providing direct answers or telling students exactly what to do. Your job is to offer guidance that enables students to reflect and improve their work independently.
IA Marking
As the name suggests, the IA is internally assessed – that is, assessed by you. You are responsible for marking your students' work. To ensure that the work has been accurately and fairly marked, a sample of IAs from your class will be sent to the IB for moderation. The sample must reflect a range of marks but avoid top-scoring candidates to allow for potential upward moderation. The moderator applies the same assessment criteria and compares their marks with yours. A moderation factor is then calculated and applied to all candidates in your school. This may result in marks being adjusted upward, downward, or remaining unchanged.
Also, make sure you keep all IA work accessible until the session officially ends, as additional samples may be requested if the initial selection is deemed inconclusive.
Applying the assessment criteria
As a teacher, you will be provided with comprehensive assessment criteria. Marking IAs is not about personal judgment; it is about applying the IB’s published criteria precisely and consistently. These criteria are set by the Principal Examiner (PE), who establishes a benchmark for each subject to ensure that every student is assessed to the same standard worldwide. Your responsibility is to become thoroughly familiar with the subject-specific criteria and to mark student work accordingly.
You will receive training to mark work accurately. Exemplars marked by the PE will be provided, allowing you to analyse them to understand how marks have been awarded. You will then be tested on your ability to apply the mark scheme effectively.
Once you are qualified to mark, your marking will be monitored through the use of “seeds” – responses that have already been definitively marked by the Principal Examiner. These seeds will be randomly included in your marking allocation. You will not be aware that you are marking a seed, which ensures that it is assessed in the same way as all other responses.
Enquiry upon results
If there is a large discrepancy between the grades you awarded your students for their IAs and the scores they received after moderation, or if you and your students feel that the work has been marked unfairly, you may, with the consent of the students, submit an Enquiry Upon Results (EUR) through the school’s IB Coordinator. In the EUR, you may request a re-moderation of the IAs. Students will be required to pay a fee for this process.
We hope you found this post helpful. For more useful materials associated with the IB check out the wide variety of IA, EE and TOK exemplars available at Clastify and other guides available on our blog.
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