Keith Spencer Check your aim All subjects →

If you are the one writing it

You are behind, and you are not sure the topic was ever any good.

Almost everyone doing an internal assessment feels like the only one who has not started properly. You have not left it too late, but the options do narrow every week, so the useful thing is to find out quickly whether what you have can score.

Send me what you have Check your aim, free

What is actually true

Your topic sets the ceiling before you write a word

If there is nothing to actually do with the subject content, no amount of good writing rescues it. This is the single most common reason a capable student ends up with a mark they did not expect. It is also the easiest thing to fix, if you fix it early.

Being stuck is not the same as being behind

A student who has changed topic twice and knows why is usually in better shape than one who has written eight pages of the wrong thing. Pages are not progress.

Personal engagement is not a paragraph about why you like the subject

It is evidence of you thinking, all the way through: your own data, a method you adapted, a result that surprised you and what you did about it.

Reflection happens while you work, not at the end

Three sentences in the conclusion is an afterthought. The best reflection is written at the moment something does not work, because that is when you actually have something to say.

The deadline you have been given is probably not the real one

Most schools set an internal draft date well before anything is due to the IB. That is deliberate and it is on your side. Work to the one you were told.

Three things to do this week

  1. Write your question in one sentence. If you cannot, that is the problem, not your writing.
  2. Ask yourself what you will actually DO with the subject content. If the answer is put the numbers in and see, change the topic now.
  3. Send me what exists, even if it is one paragraph and a bad title.
Your parent needs to be the one who contacts me if you are under 18. That is not me being awkward, it is the only way this is done properly.

Send me what you have

You might be the wrong one of these

People arrive here as a student and turn out to be a parent, or the other way round. Both of the others are worth two minutes.

ParentsYou can see they are stressed. You cannot tell whether that is normal. TeachersYou have been given IA supervision and nobody trained you for it.

Want a verdict on your own draft?

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.