IB & IBMYP Assessment Information 'No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in their mode of thought.' John Stuart Mills

Assessment criteria*

The Diploma Program in IB uses several methods to assess work produced by students.

Assessment criteria are used when the assessment task is open-ended. Each criterion concentrates on a particular skill that students are expected to demonstrate. An assessment objective describes what students should be able to do and assessment criteria describe how well they should be able to do it. Using assessment criteria allows discrimination between different answers and encourages a variety of responses. Each criterion comprises a set of hierarchically ordered level descriptors. Each level descriptor is worth one or more marks. Each criterion is applied independently using a best-fit model. The maximum marks for each criterion may differ according to the criterion’s importance. The marks awarded for each criterion are added together to give the total mark for the piece of work.

The Middle Years Program in IB uses several methods to assess work produced by the students.

There is no external assessment provided by the IB for the MYP and therefore no formal externally set or marked examinations. All assessment in the MYP is carried out by teachers in participating schools and relies on their professional expertise in making qualitative judgments, as they do every day in the classroom. MYP schools must follow a criterion?related approach. This means that students’ work must be assessed against defined assessment criteria and not against the work of other students.

Markbands

Markbands are a comprehensive statement of expected performance against which responses are judged. They represent a single holistic criterion divided into level descriptors. Each level descriptor corresponds to a range of marks to differentiate student performance. A best-fit approach is used to ascertain which particular mark to use from the possible range for each level descriptor.

Subject specific Assessment

There is additional information for IBMYP United States Government (9th grade) and IB History of the Americas (12th grade) on the pages below:

IBMYP United States Government

IB History of the Americas

*information taken from various IB documents including History Guide first examinations 2010 and MYP: From Principles into Practice

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