The five Assessment Criteria 

The IB practical programme has one very great strength - teachers are completely free to devise their own practical programme. There is absolutely no requirement for students to perform any one specific practical or experiment. All that is required is that during the 40 hours (SL) or 60 Hours (HL) programme sufficient investigations are undertaken for five different criteria to be assessed.

 

                Design (D)

                Data collection and processing (DCP)

                Conclusion and evaluation (CE)

                Manipulative skills (MS)

                Personal skills (PS)

 

Three of these criteria must be assessed at least twice. One is only assessed during the Group 4 Project and the remaining one is assessed summatively over the whole course. 

The three that must be assessed at least twice are:  Design (D), Data collection and processing (DCP) and Conclusion and evaluation (CE). Each one is marked out of a total of 6 marks and the two best marks for each of the criteria are the ones that count towards the final mark. Thus the maximum that can be obtained for these three criteria is 36.

Personal skills (PS) is assessed only once during the Group 4 project and the maximum mark is 6.

Manipulative skills (MS) is assessed summatively over the whole course and should be based on a wide range of manipulative skills (although the actual manipulative skills are not specified in the syllabus). The maximum mark is 6.

Thus the total mark for the Internal Assessment is 48 – made up from

                D        2 x 6 =12

                DCP   2 x 6 = 12

                CE     2 x 6 = 12

                PS     1 x 6 =  6

                MS    1 x 6 =   6

                   Total          48

The student’s mark out of 48 is the mark submitted to the IB. Once moderation has occurred the IB effectively halves this mark to give a total mark out of 24. This mark then counts towards their final overall mark making 24% of the total with the remaining 76% from the External Assessment (exams).

 

 

Aspects

Each of the five criteria is divided into three aspects. Each aspect has specific descriptors. You, the teacher, must decide whether the student has met the requirements described by each descriptor completely (c), partially (p) or ‘not at all’ (n). A complete (c) is awarded two marks, a partial (p) one mark and ‘not at all’ (n) zero marks. The descriptors for the relevant three aspects are given on the specific page for each criterion.

 

 

Addressing the criteria

As stated in the introductory page on Internal Assessment, there are many reasons for doing practical work and assessment is only one of them. Each of the first three criteria must be assessed twice so the minimum number of practicals that could be done, each of which is suitable for such assessment, is two. In reality teachers will want to give their students several suitable practicals so that they can learn from their mistakes and improve their performance. When I lead workshops with experienced teachers we spend some time sharing examples of good practice and have settled on several good practicals that ‘work’ for assessment.  By ‘work’ I mean that they address the criteria fully and good students can obtain ‘complete’ on each of the aspects. Most teachers choose practicals that can be used to assess both Data collection and processing (DCP) and Conclusion and Evaluation (CE) together. They usually do three or four of these. They then give the students about four Design (D) practicals. These can obviously be assessed for Design but depending on the focused problem the student comes up with they may, or may not, also be suitable for assessing DCP and CE. This means that the best two marks out of four can be used for Design (D) and there will be at least four, but more probably five or six separate marks for each of DCP and CE that the best two can be chosen from.  In total this works out to be about say seven or eight practicals at 1.5 or 2h each, i.e. a total of about 12-16 hours. You must also devote 10 hours to the Group 4 project. This means that for Standard Level you have about 14-18 hours of non- assessed practical work and for Higher Level about 34-38 hours of non-assessed practical work – and you are completely free to use this as you wish with hopefully an exciting and varied set of practicals covering many of the skills that a chemist needs.

 

 

Links 

In the linked pages you will find information for each of the separate criteria. This includes the descriptors and how best to advise the students to maximise their marks for each of the aspects and advice on which practicals make for good assessment. You will also be able to find links to marked examples of actual student work for the first three criteria D, DCP and CE as these are the only three that need to be sent off for moderation. For how to assess Personal skills you will need to look at the assessment page under Group 4 Project. Although everything you should need is included you should also read the relevant pages (21-39) in the Chemistry Subject Guide and also read the section on Internal Assessment in the latest Chief Examiner's Report. This section ends with information on how to complete the 4/PSOW (Group 4 Practical Scheme of Work) form for every student and how to present selected work for moderation.