IB Mathematics Internal Assessment
Structure will not turn weak mathematics into strong mathematics. But the wrong structure will bury good mathematics so deep that a reader cannot find it, and marks are awarded to what the reader can see, not to what you meant. Here is an order that works, section by section, and what each part is actually for.
Every IA needs the same handful of jobs done somewhere in it: state what you are investigating and why, show the mathematics being applied properly, present and check results honestly, and stand back and say what it means. The headings you choose matter less than whether each job gets done clearly and in an order the reader can follow without flicking back and forth.
Where students lose marks is not usually a missing section. It is a job done in the wrong place, done twice by accident, or not done at all because it was assumed rather than written down.
The introduction has three things to do: say what question you are answering, say why you are the right person to answer it, and say roughly how. That is it. It does not need a history of the topic, a definition of every term you are about to use, or a paragraph explaining what mathematics is.
The reader spends a page learning facts about the general topic and reaches the end still not knowing what the student is actually going to do. By the time the research question arrives it feels like an afterthought rather than the point of the document.
The research question is stated plainly near the top, in a sentence a reader could repeat back. The context that follows explains only what the reader needs to understand why this particular question, to this particular student, matters.
This is usually the longest section and the one that carries the most marks, because it is where the mathematics actually happens. Its job is to show a reader how you got from the question to a result, with enough working that they could follow the same path themselves. Notation should be consistent throughout, and any method that is not standard course content should be explained in your own words rather than assumed.
A common failure here is presenting a correct final answer with the working compressed to almost nothing, as though the mathematics were obvious. If it were obvious, it would not be worth six marks in this criterion. Show the steps that mattered, and skip the steps that were pure arithmetic.
A table or a graph is evidence, not an argument. This section's job is to say what the evidence shows, in words, immediately next to where it appears. If you have collected or generated data, this is also where you check whether the model actually fits it, rather than simply stating that it does.
A graph appears, followed directly by the next calculation. The reader is left to work out for themselves whether the fit was good, whether a value stood out, or whether anything about the result was surprising.
Directly under the graph, a short paragraph states what it shows, flags anything unexpected, and says what it means for the next step. The reader never has to guess what they are supposed to notice.
Evaluation is not a confession booth where you list everything that could have gone wrong in general. Its job is to say, specifically, where your particular method or model is weak, and where possible to show that weakness with mathematics rather than just asserting it. A comment like "the sample was small" earns very little on its own. Showing what changed when you tried a larger sample, or what the model predicted badly and why, earns a great deal more.
Go back to the exact wording of your research question from the introduction and answer it directly, in light of what section three and four actually showed. A conclusion that answers a slightly different, tidier question than the one that was asked reads as though the student lost track of their own aim somewhere in the middle.
Treating reflection as a single paragraph at the end is the most common structural mistake in this list. Reflection scores best when it appears at the moments it actually happened: the decision to change method, the point where a result did not match expectation, the choice between two models. A closing paragraph can summarise, but it cannot manufacture reflection that was never written down where it belongs. There is a full guide to this linked below.
References should let a reader find your sources, nothing more elaborate is needed. Appendices exist to hold bulk material, such as a full raw data table, that would slow the main text down without adding an argument. Check with your teacher how your school wants appendices treated, since a moderator does not always give them the same weight as the body of the exploration, and analysis that lives only in an appendix risks not being read as analysis at all.
None of this is a rule from the subject guide. It is the order that, in my experience reading these every year, lets a reader find the mathematics fastest and lets the marks land where the work actually is.
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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.
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