IB Internal Assessment: A Parent's Planning Guide
By Renzo Diaz·3 min read
"The IA" is a convenient shorthand, but it doesn't describe one assignment shared across every IB subject — Mathematics has a mathematical exploration, Physics has a scientific investigation, and other subjects use their own formats and criteria entirely. The single most useful thing a parent can secure is the student's correct subject guide, cohort, and school deadline — a generic online "how to write an IA" template can easily be wrong for one or more of those three.
Treating every IA as interchangeable is an easy mistake to make from the outside, since the word gets used the same way across every subject a student takes — but the weighting, the format, and even the assessment criteria genuinely differ subject by subject, and sometimes cohort by cohort within the same subject.
"The IA" is one phrase covering genuinely different tasks with genuinely different criteria, depending on the subject and the cohort.
1. Build a one-page assessment inventory
A short inventory, built once at the start of the process, does more to prevent last-minute confusion than any general advice about time management. For each subject with an IA component, it's worth recording the task and its weighting, which rubric version actually applies to this specific cohort, the school's own internal milestones, and the specific next action the student needs to take.
| Subject | Rubric version to confirm | Student's next action |
|---|---|---|
| Math AA or AI | Current course, or the criteria first assessed in 2029? | Define the exploration question and why the chosen method actually fits it |
| Physics | First-assessment-2025 course (the current one) | Pilot the method and consider measurement uncertainty before committing to it |
| Other subjects | Record the specific examination year for each | Ask the subject teacher directly what evidence each criterion actually requires For Mathematics specifically, the IB has published revised exploration criteria for first assessment in 2029, while older cohorts continue under the current framework. Physics's current course was first assessed in 2025, and its scientific investigation counts for 20% of the final grade at both HL and SL. |
2. Ask about evidence before polishing prose
An exploration can contain entirely correct mathematics and still fail to show why the student chose that specific model over an alternative. An investigation can include a neat, well-formatted graph and still lack a persuasive account of whether the underlying data actually support the claim being made. Asking the student directly to explain the question, the chosen method, the limitations, and what they'd revise after seeing their own results is a fast, honest check — if they can't answer, a more polished introduction won't fix the actual, underlying problem.
It's worth respecting the school's own feedback and academic-integrity rules carefully here. A parent can reasonably discuss ideas, help build a calendar, and ask probing questions — but the assessed work has to remain genuinely the student's own, and what kind of feedback is actually permitted, and at which stage of the process, depends on the specific task and the school's own procedures. Asking the teacher directly settles this faster than guessing.
A neat graph and a persuasive account of what the data actually support are two different things. Ask for the second one directly.
3. Plan around the school's actual dates
Writing down the real proposal, data-collection, draft, permitted-feedback, and final-submission dates — rather than working from a vague sense of "later this term" — surfaces dependencies early enough to actually act on them. A Physics experiment might need equipment booked in advance and time for repeat measurements; a Maths exploration might need genuinely accessible data and enough time to test whether the chosen assumptions actually hold. Scheduling exam preparation around these real milestones, instead of assuming every IA can simply be "finished in six weeks" regardless of subject, avoids a predictable last-minute collision.
If a draft ends up late, the useful diagnostic question is which specific dependency failed first — question, method, data, reasoning, or writing — and resolving that constraint directly with the teacher. "Spend another weekend on the IA" isn't yet a plan; it only becomes one once the student knows precisely what that weekend actually needs to produce.
4. Where to go for subject-specific detail
General planning discipline gets a family most of the way there, but the actual assessment criteria differ enough by subject that a subject-specific guide is worth reading directly once the inventory above identifies which subjects need it most.
The task of a coach or tutor in this process is to strengthen a student's own reasoning and independence within the school's assessment rules — not to author any part of assessed work. That boundary matters as much for the IA's academic integrity as it does for what the exercise is actually meant to build in the student.
Sources
Sources below are the IB's own current pages, checked directly in a browser.