The IB Extended Essay reflections and the RPPF — and why they cost marks

Most IB students treat the Extended Essay reflections as paperwork — a box to tick on the way to submitting the real thing. That instinct quietly costs marks. The reflections you write on the Reflections on Planning and Progress Form, the RPPF, aren't a formality. They're assessed, and for a strong essay they can be the difference between grades.

What the RPPF actually is

The RPPF captures three reflection sessions with your supervisor across the life of the project: an early one as you settle your question and approach, an interim one as the research develops, and a final one — the viva voce— after you submit. You write a short reflection after each, and the form travels to the examiner alongside your essay. It isn't a diary. It's evidence.

Why Criterion E rewards the reflections

Those reflections are marked under Criterion E: Engagement, worth six marks — and unlike the rest of the essay, the examiner assesses them onlythrough what you write on the RPPF. That's the catch. A brilliant piece of research with a thin, generic RPPF leaves those six marks stranded, because the examiner has no other window onto your engagement with the process.

Criterion E rewards intellectual initiative and genuine reflection — the decisions you made, the setbacks you hit, what you'd do differently. "I researched my topic and found it interesting" earns almost nothing. "I abandoned my first research question when the sources contradicted my assumption, and reframed it around…" shows the thinking the criterion is looking for.

The examiner can only reward the engagement they can read. On the RPPF, your process is worth marks — but only the part of it you put into words.

Marking the reflections against the criterion

Because the reflections are assessed against a stated criterion, you can check them the same way you'd check any criterion-marked work: does each reflection show genuine engagement, or does it merely describe what happened? The loop is the one that works across the whole EE — mark against the descriptor, find the weakest response, strengthen it, re-check.

That's the gap Mark was built to close for Extended Essay writers: upload the assessment criteria and your draft — including your RPPF reflections — and he returns a mark per criterion with the quoted line as evidence, so you can see whether Criterion E is genuinely rewarding your engagement or leaving marks on the table. The same criterion-based habit carries across the rest of your IB assessments, where every internal assessment is marked to a published grid.

Three things to do before you submit the RPPF

• Write reflections as you go, not at the end. The early reflection should sound like someone still deciding — because you were. Reconstructed-in-hindsight reflections read flat.
• Name real decisions and setbacks. Criterion E rewards the wrong turns you recovered from far more than a smooth, incident-free account.
• Check each reflection against the descriptor. If a reflection only describes what you did, rewrite it to show what you thought and decided.