IB Maths IA Criteria: Which Rubric Applies to Your Exam Year?
By Renzo Diaz·3 min read
The mathematical exploration is worth 20% of the final grade in both AA and AI, at SL and HL. The current exploration is marked against five criteria — presentation, mathematical communication, personal engagement, reflection, and use of mathematics. A revised, four-criterion rubric — problem specification, abstraction, computation and interpretation, each worth a share of 20 marks — applies from first assessment in May 2029. Planning against the wrong one wastes real work.
Two students starting the Diploma a year apart can be working toward genuinely different exploration criteria, and advice or example explorations written for one rubric don't automatically transfer to the other. Before planning an exploration topic around a specific criterion, it's worth confirming which rubric actually applies to your own cohort.
The exploration is worth as much as an entire exam paper. Which rubric it's marked against depends on when you started the Diploma, not on the topic you choose.
1. The exploration's weighting doesn't change — the rubric does
The mathematical exploration counts for 20% of the final grade in both Mathematics: Analysis and Approaches and Mathematics: Applications and Interpretation, at both SL and HL — the weighting is constant across every combination of course and level. What changes is which set of assessment criteria a specific cohort is marked against.
The current exploration is assessed against five criteria: presentation, mathematical communication, personal engagement, reflection, and use of mathematics. A revised rubric, built around a different underlying model — problem specification, abstraction, computation and interpretation — takes over for students whose first assessment session is May 2029 onward, following the same course revision that changes the exam papers. The two rubrics reward genuinely different things, not just a relabelling of the same five ideas into four.
2. What the revised criteria actually weigh
For the May 2029 rubric, the IB has published the exact structure: problem specification is worth 4 marks, abstraction 6, computation 4, and interpretation 6 — twenty marks in total, matching the exploration's existing 20% weighting. The four criteria trace the same inquiry sequence a working mathematician actually follows: specify the problem in context, abstract it into a workable mathematical form, carry out the computation, then interpret and evaluate what the result actually means.
That structure rewards a different kind of exploration than the current rubric does. Where the current model gives real weight to personal engagement and reflection as criteria in their own right, the revised model folds engagement and reflection into the interpretation stage rather than scoring them separately — a genuine shift in what a strong exploration needs to demonstrate, not just new terminology for the same expectations.
| Revised criterion (May 2029 onward) | Marks | What it actually assesses |
|---|---|---|
| A. Problem specification | 4 | Posing and framing a genuine mathematical question, with clear desired outcomes |
| B. Abstraction | 6 | Choosing assumptions, techniques and tools, and forming a mathematical model |
| C. Computation | 4 | Carrying out the calculations and communicating them clearly |
| D. Interpretation | 6 | Interpreting results, evaluating against the original outcomes, and refining the approach |
3. Choosing a topic before knowing your rubric is a real risk
A topic well-suited to the current rubric's personal-engagement and reflection criteria doesn't automatically translate into a strong showing against the revised rubric's abstraction and interpretation criteria, and the reverse is equally true. Confirming which rubric applies — a five-minute question to a school's own IB coordinator — is worth doing before committing real time to a specific topic and approach, not after a draft is already underway.
The more durable habit, regardless of which rubric applies, is choosing a topic specific enough to support a genuine mathematical inquiry rather than a broad area that only gestures at one. "Modelling population growth" is a topic; "does a logistic model fit recorded population data for a specific city better than an exponential one, and over what range does that hold" is a question an exploration can actually investigate and defend.
A topic suited to one rubric doesn't automatically suit the other. Confirm which one applies before committing real time to a topic.
Sources
The source below is the IB's own current curriculum-update page, checked directly in a browser.