IB Mathematics Internal Assessment
Most students plan an IA forwards, from today, and run out of road. Start from the date your school gave you and count backwards. The plan below works for any deadline from about ten weeks up, and it shows you where the slack really lives.
Forward planning feels generous. "I have all term" turns into three weeks of choosing a topic and a panic at the end. Backwards planning forces you to put the unglamorous jobs on the calendar first: the last read-through, the teacher's draft feedback, the time you need to fix what the feedback says. Those are the weeks that get squeezed, and they are worth more marks than another page of calculation.
Use your own school's dates. Your school sets an internal deadline and a draft date, and they differ from school to school. If you are not sure what they are, ask your teacher or coordinator this week, not next month.
Write these on a calendar before anything else:
Everything else fits around those. The most common mistake is to plan as if every week is free. They are not, and you know which ones are not.
Here is a shape that has worked for students I have seen over the years. Read it as proportions, not as a rule. If you have twelve weeks, a block is about a week. If you have eight, squeeze each one. The blocks are listed from the deadline backwards.
Read the whole thing aloud. Check every graph is labelled, every source is credited, every symbol is defined. Nothing new goes in. Aim to finish a few days early so a broken file or a printer problem is an annoyance rather than a disaster.
Your draft comes back with comments. Sort them, turn each into a question, and work through them in order of marks at stake. Fixing a weak model or a missing justification takes real time, so do not assume a weekend is enough.
Put it together as a complete document, even if parts are rough. A whole draft is far more useful to your teacher than three polished pages and a gap.
This is where you do the work: build the model, run the analysis, test it, find where it breaks. Keep notes as you go on why you chose each method. That is your reflection, and it is much harder to invent afterwards.
If you are collecting your own data, this block comes before the mathematics and it is the one that slips. Real data needs repeating when something goes wrong. Leave room for that.
Choose, test the topic against the thirty-second question ("what will I actually do with the mathematics?"), and narrow it. Do not let this stretch past two weeks. A decent topic started now beats a perfect one started in a month.
Students assume the slack is at the end. It is not. The end is full of non-negotiable jobs. The slack is in the middle, if you protect it: a week you deliberately leave empty so that a failed model, a bad dataset or a stalled week does not push everything else back.
Do not use that week for catching up on other subjects. Put a visible line in the calendar and call it "repair". If you do not need it, you have a head start on the draft.
Suppose your school gives you a deadline twelve weeks from now, and a draft date at the end of week eight. Counting back:
Notice how little spare room there is. That is the point. Twelve weeks sounds like a lot until you write it down.
Do not rebuild the whole plan. Work out how many weeks you honestly have, protect the last two blocks (feedback and final check) first, and then shrink the middle. Shrinking usually means narrowing the question, not cutting corners on the mathematics. A smaller question, done properly, scores better than a large one done thinly.
If your topic is the problem rather than the time, decide this week whether to narrow it or change it. Each week you wait makes switching more expensive.
Not sure your plan fits your deadline?
Send me your dates and where you are now. I read real submitted explorations every year, and I will help you see what to do first and what to drop so the marks that matter are not the ones you run out of time for.
Get the IA sorted with meMore like this: all Maths IA guides. Related: how to use teacher feedback on your Maths IA draft
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.
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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.