IB Mathematics Internal Assessment
Use of Mathematics is 6 of the 20 marks, and your topic sets its ceiling. Most students pick in a hurry and then spend two months trying to force marks out of something that cannot produce them. Here is how to tell the difference early.
Ask yourself one question about your topic: what will I actually do with the mathematics?
If the honest answer is "put the numbers in and see what comes out", the topic has a ceiling. If the answer involves choosing between methods, adapting something, or following a result you did not expect, you have something worth two months.
You collect data, compute a correlation coefficient, draw a line of best fit, and conclude that taller people have bigger feet. The mathematics is one technique, applied once, and it is well below HL level. There is nothing to reflect on because nothing surprising can happen.
Enormously popular, and usually a curve-fitting exercise dressed up. If all you do is fit functions to a shape you traced from a photograph, the mathematics is routine and the personal engagement is hard to evidence, because nothing about it is yours.
Almost always descriptive. You end up reporting other people's findings and measuring a few things. It reads as a research essay with numbers in it rather than an exploration you drove.
Not because the topics are bad, but because the personal engagement criterion is reading for evidence that you chose this. If the exploration could have been written by anybody, that is exactly how it scores.
Your own training times, your commute, your part-time job's queue lengths. Own data gives you genuine engagement for free, real messiness to reflect on, and decisions to justify about how you cleaned and modelled it.
The moment you have to argue why one approach suits your situation better than another, you are writing at the top of Use of Mathematics and generating reflection as a by-product.
A model that fits badly, an assumption that fails, a result that contradicts what you expected. Students try to hide these. They are the most valuable thing in the document, because reflection and engagement are 6 marks between them and this is where they live.
Not a textbook box-folding problem, but something where the constraint is genuine and you have to decide what to do about it. Plenty of mathematics, a clear aim, and an obvious thing to reflect on.
Most topics can be rescued by narrowing them rather than abandoning them. "Does height correlate with shoe size" is dead, but "can I predict my own running times well enough to plan a race" is not, and it may use much of the work you have already done.
The decision worth making early is whether to narrow or to change, and it gets more expensive every week you leave it.
Send me your topic and I will tell you honestly whether it can score.
Free, half an hour, no obligation. I coordinate the IB Diploma and I read real submitted explorations against real criteria every year, so I am not guessing. If the topic has a ceiling I will say so, and if I cannot help I will tell you that too.
Send me your topicNext: the five criteria, explained the way a moderator reads them
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.