IB Mathematics Internal Assessment
Students ask this more than almost anything else, usually at 11pm with a document that has grown out of control. The honest answer is that length is a symptom. A long IA is nearly always an unfocused one, and the marks you lose come from the lack of focus, not from a page count.
The subject guide gives a recommended length for the exploration. I am not going to quote it here, because guides get revised and you should work from the current copy your school holds. Ask your teacher for the exact figure and how it is counted, including what your school expects for appendices, tables and graphs.
What I can tell you is how the length interacts with the marking, because that is what decides whether going over costs you anything.
Communication is criterion B, and in my own words it asks whether your work is well organised, easy to follow and concise. That last word matters. A reader who has to wade through repeated working, three versions of the same graph and a page of background you did not need will judge the communication accordingly.
There is also a quieter cost. Every extra page is a page where a slip can appear, an unexplained symbol, a weak claim, a graph with no axis labels. Longer documents give a reader more chances to lose confidence in you.
Whether a school or a moderator does anything specific about a document that is far over the recommendation is not something I would rely on either way. Do not treat the recommended range as a target you can stretch. Treat it as the size of the job you have been given.
The same calculation is shown for five data points, then a table of all five results, then a paragraph describing the table, then a graph of the table, then a paragraph describing the graph. Nothing is wrong, and nothing is new after the first example.
The method is shown fully once, clearly. The remaining cases are gathered into a single table, and the text says only what the table reveals that the first example did not. The reader gets the same evidence in a third of the space.
The opposite problem is real too. If you are well under the recommended range, ask yourself whether you have actually done the reflecting, the justifying and the interpreting, or only the calculating. Short IAs are often missing the explanation between the steps.
If that describes you, the fix is not padding. It is more thinking, written down where it belongs.
Go through the draft with a pen and ask of each paragraph: what would the reader not know if this were gone?
For every page, write one sentence saying what it does for the argument. Not what it contains, what it does. "Justifies why I chose a quadratic model over an exponential one." "Shows my prediction and how far the data disagreed." If you cannot write the sentence, the page is a candidate for cutting or merging. If two pages get the same sentence, they are probably one page.
Some tricks look clever and backfire, so it is worth naming them. Shrinking the font or the margins to fit more in is obvious to a reader and signals that you could not edit. Shoving essential working into an appendix so the main text looks shorter usually makes the argument hard to follow. And cramming several graphs into one tiny image makes the axes unreadable, which is a communication problem all over again.
If a piece of working is essential to your argument, it belongs in the body. If it is not essential, it probably should not be in the document at all.
Narrow margins, a smaller font and six graphs shrunk onto one page. The page count looks respectable. The reader cannot read a single axis label, and the document feels cramped and anxious.
The best IAs I read tend to be a sensible size because their question was a sensible size. A question that can be answered with one well chosen model and one honest evaluation fits comfortably. A question that needs three models, two data sets and a proof will always be fighting the recommended range.
So if you are badly over, look upstream. Ask whether you are really answering one question or quietly answering three. Narrowing the aim is often the single most effective edit, because a narrower question removes whole sections rather than trimming sentences. It also tends to improve the depth of what remains, and depth is what the other criteria reward.
Then stop. A tight, clear exploration that answers its question beats a longer one that circles it, every time I have marked the two side by side.
Draft too long, or too thin?
Send me what you have. I read real submitted explorations every year, and I will tell you which pages are earning marks, which are padding, and what is missing, while there is still time to fix it.
Get the IA sorted with meMore like this: all Maths IA guides. Related: reflection in the Maths IA
A new IA guide goes up most nights. If you would rather not keep checking, leave an email and I will send the one that matters that week. No selling, and leave whenever you like.
If you are under 18, use a parent's email. I do not correspond privately with students.
These pages are free and stay free, but they are general and your IA is not. Send me your research question, or whatever exists so far, and I will tell you in writing whether the topic has a ceiling on it, where the marks are going, and what to change first. That costs nothing and it comes back within 24 hours.
Written by a serving IB Diploma and Career-related Programme Coordinator and Head of Mathematics, who reads internal assessments across every subject group every year. If you then want the whole draft reviewed properly against all five criteria, that is the paid one, and it is refunded if it does not name at least three specific things to fix.
Get a free verdict Full written review, $99
I never write any part of it. Not a sentence, not a calculation, not your data. Under 18: a parent buys this and the thread is with them. I do not work with students at my own school.