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Your overall IB mark (the
one sent to universities after the IB
test) in any IB science course is based
upon two kinds of assessments or grades:
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External
Assessment:
Your score on end-of-course exam
(76% of
total IB mark) |
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Internal
Assessment:
Your performance on in class
laboratory work
(24% of total IB
mark) |
Internal Assessment is a
collection of work completed by the
student during the course of the IB
class. Biology HL students are required
to demonstrate 60 hours of
laboratory/field investigations over the
two years of the course.
Your laboratory work and
report write-ups will be assessed (that
means ‘graded’) using very strict IB
criteria. All IB science teachers
world-wide must use the same criteria
and apply them in the same way—quite a
challenge!! To ensure that everyone is
following the rules and applying the
criteria correctly, schools must send
samples of graded student lab reports to
IB for monitoring.
If a teacher is being too
hard or too soft, that teacher’s marks
which were awarded to students will be
adjusted accordingly.
For a
printable summary of IB internal
assessment requirements,
click here.
For a
printable summary rubric used to score IB internal
assessments,
click here.
IB lab reports are graded
using five IB Internal Assessment
Criteria. They are:
Each of the criteria is
further divided into two or three parts
called ‘Aspects’. When a lab report is
graded, it is determined whether you met
each aspect completely,
partially, or not at all (c,
p or n). This will then determine
what mark you earn on that section
of your lab report. Each “complete”
score is worth 2 points, each “partial”
is worth 1 point and each “not at all”
is worth o points.
The maximum
mark for each criterion is 6
(representing three “completes”).
Each student must be
assessed at least twice on the “Design,”
“Data
collection and processing,”
and “Conclusion
and evaluation”
IB Internal Assessment
Criteria. In the spring of the second
year of the course, your IB Biology
teacher will review your portfolio and
the marks you have achieved against each
of the criteria. At the end of the
course, the score sent to IB in each
criterion is not an average of all your
labs. Instead, it is a summary mark
that reflects your level of achievement
by the end of the course. So don’t
worry if you get some low scores
initially. They won’t count against you
as long as you steadily improve. There
is plenty of time to learn and improve
as the course goes on!
Wow, this looks like an
awful lot of work for lab reports! But
you must keep in mind that you will not
have to write a full lab report (using
all the criteria) for every lab!! In
fact, most of the labs we do will focus
on only one or two of the criteria, so
you will only write up these parts.
Only a few labs will assess all
criteria.
In addition to this very
strict and formal IB Internal Assessment
for laboratory work, your work must also
be graded for your regular course
grade. So you can expect to receive a
second score on each lab report for this
grade.
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