IB Internal Assessment

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:

	External Assessment:  Your score on end-of-course exam (76% of total IB mark)
	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.

IB lab reports are graded using five IB Internal Assessment Criteria.  They are:

	Design—D
	Data collection and processing—DCP (includes lab drawing, statistics and graphing)
	Conclusion and evaluation—CE (includes error analysis)
	Manipulative skills—MS
	Personal skills—PS

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 teachers will review your portfolio and the marks you have achieved against each of the criteria.  Based on your performance over all labs during the 2-year course, you will be awarded an overall score of 0-3 against each criterion.  At the end of the course, the score sent to IB (0-3) 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.