IB Internal Assessment: how the IA criteria are really applied

The Internal Assessment is where a lot of IB marks quietly leak away — not because students don't work hard, but because they write the thing they thinkis impressive rather than the thing the criteria reward. The IA is not marked on gut feel or on how much you did. It's marked against a set of subject-specific assessment criteria, and knowing how those criteria are applied is most of the battle.

How an IA is marked

Every IB subject publishes its own assessment criteria for the IA — lettered strands, each describing a distinct aspect of the task, each with its own set of markbandsand a maximum number of marks. Your teacher reads your work against those markbands and decides, for each criterion, which band-level descriptor best matches what you've actually produced. The strands are then added together for your total.

The crucial point: marks are awarded per criterion, not overall. A brilliant investigation with a thin evaluation loses the evaluation marks no matter how strong the rest is. This is the same principle that governs marking right across the IB's IA and EE marking — the criteria are the instrument, and each one is scored on its own terms.

Internal marking, external moderation

Here's the part students often miss: the IA is marked internally by your teacher, but then externally moderatedby the IB. A sample of your cohort's work is sent away and checked against the same criteria. If the moderator finds the school marked too generously or too harshly, the whole cohort's marks are adjusted to bring them into line.

Your teacher gives the mark, but the criteria have the final word. Write to the descriptors and you're safe from moderation either way.

This is why writing to the published markbands — rather than to what you think will please your teacher — is the reliable strategy. The moderator has never met you. All they have is your work and the criteria.

Reading the markbands like a moderator

Markband descriptors climb through predictable language, and the jumps between bands are where marks are won or lost:

• "Limited" → "adequate" → "good": how fully your work meets the demands of the criterion.
• "Describes" → "analyses" → "evaluates": whether you report, explain, or genuinely weigh.
• "Some" → "consistent": whether a quality appears once or runs through the whole piece.

Map each of your paragraphs to a criterion and ask which band-level verb it currently earns. The honest answer usually points straight at the redraft. The same discipline carries into the longer IB tasks — the Extended Essay and the TOK essay are marked on published criteria in exactly this spirit.

Practise the way you're marked

If your IA is scored per criterion, then useful practice returns per-criterion information. A single overall grade can't tell you which strand is dragging you down. A read that marks each criterion separately can — and that's the loop worth running: mark, fix the weakest criterion, re-mark.

That's what Mark handles IB IA and EE markingfor: upload the assessment criteria for your subject and your draft, and he returns a mark per criterion with the quoted line as evidence — the same band judgement a moderator makes, on your own draft, before it's due.