external assessment

KEY DATES

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The essay assesses a candidates’ ability to reflect on knowledge questions and their TOK thinking skills through the discussion of one of the six prescribed titles.

The titles are not meant to be treated only in the abstract, or on the basis of external authorities. In all cases, essays should express the conclusions reached by students through a sustained consideration of knowledge questions.

Claims and counterclaims should be formulated and main ideas should be illustrated with effective examples.

Essays should demonstrate the student’s ability to link knowledge questions to AOKs and/or WOKs. 


Overall, the main question you must answer for the external assessment is this:

“Does the student present an appropriate and cogent analysis of knowledge questions in discussing the title?”

The maximum length of the essay is 1,600 words. Extended notes, extensive footnotes or appendices are 
not appropriate to a TOK essay and may not be read.

• the main part of the essay 
 and any quotations.

• any acknowledgments 

• the references (whether given in footnotes, endnotes or in-text) 

• any maps, charts, diagrams, annotated illustrations or tables 

• the bibliography. 


Essays that exceed the word limit will be penalized in the following ways:

• examiners are instructed to stop reading after 1,600 words and to base their assessment on just the first 1,600 words. 

• a 1 mark penalty will be applied to the essay. 


Students are required to indicate the number of words when the essay is uploaded during the submission process. 


ACADEMIC HONESTY

THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE GUIDE, 2015

Authenticity

Teachers must ensure to the best of their ability that essays are the student’s own work. In cases where there is concern, the authenticity of the essay can be checked through a discussion with the student and scrutiny of one or more of the following before uploading:

• the student’s initial exploration of the title 

• the full draft of the essay 

• the student’s references and/or bibliography for the essay, where appropriate 

• the style of the writing, which may reveal obvious discrepancies 

• a report from an online plagiarism detection service. 


Acknowledgments and references 


Students are expected to acknowledge fully and in detail the work, thoughts or ideas of another person if incorporated in work submitted for assessment, and to ensure that their own work is never given to another student, either in the form of hard copy or by electronic means, knowing that it might be submitted for assessment as the work of that other student. 
The IB does not prescribe which style(s) of referencing or in-text citation should be used by students; this is left to the discretion of appropriate faculty/staff in the school. Regardless of the reference style adopted by the school for a given subject, it is expected that the minimum information given includes name of author(s), date of publication, title of source, and page numbers as applicable. 


Students are expected to use a standard style and use it consistently so that credit is given to all sources used, including sources that have been paraphrased or summarized. When writing text a student must clearly distinguish between their words and those of others by the use of quotation marks (or other method such as indentation) followed by an appropriate reference that denotes an entry in the bibliography or works cited. The title “bibliography” or “works cited” depends on the referencing style that has been chosen. If an electronic source is cited, the date of access must be indicated.

Students are not expected to show faultless expertise in referencing, but are expected to demonstrate that all sources have been acknowledged. Students must be advised that visual material, text, graphs, images and/or data published in print or in electronic sources that is not their own must also be attributed to the source. Again, an appropriate style of referencing/citation must be used.

Factual claims that may be considered common knowledge (for example, “animals are not capable of performing photosynthesis”) do not need to be referenced. However, it should be noted that what one person thinks of as common knowledge within a particular culture, may be unfamiliar to someone else, for example, an examiner in a different part of the world. This would relate particularly to examples given from popular culture. If in doubt, give an authoritative source for the claim.

Classroom handouts, if they are the original work of a teacher, must be cited in the same way as a book. If their contents have been taken from a separate source, that source should be cited.

Bibliography or works cited

The TOK essay is not primarily a research paper but it is expected that specific sources will be used and these must be acknowledged in a bibliography or works cited list.

The bibliography or works cited should include only those works (such as books, journals, magazines and online sources) used by the student. There needs to be a clear connection between the works listed and where they are used in the text. A list of books at the end of the essay is not useful unless reference has been made to all of them within the essay.

As appropriate, the bibliography or works cited list should specify:

• author(s), title, date and place of publication 

• the name of the publisher or URL http://... 

• the date when the web page was accessed, adhering to one standard method of listing sources.

Failure to comply with this requirement will be viewed as plagiarism and will, therefore, be treated as a case of academic misconduct. 


COMMON MISTAKES AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

FROM IB Publishing, IBO

THE ESSAY

Many of the mistakes that are made by weaker students result from poorly developed understanding of the objectives combined with following a weak process. Some of the common mistakes seen in TOK essays are identified below, along with advice on how they can be avoided. 

MISUNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF THE ESSAY

The goal of the TOK essay is not to evaluate the personal values of students, to explore conspiracy theories or to debate moral issues and themes. The essay invites students to consider the factors that influence our willingness to accept or reject information as knowledge. Students who do not appreciate this will often produce essays that fail to address the task and the criteria. Students should also remember that the TOK essay is not a research essay and so is not subject to the same requirements as the extended essay (apart from the requirements associated with academic honesty). 

THE SCOPE OF THE ESSAY

It is important that students are realistic about how much they can cover in a TOK essay which can be a maximum of 1,600 words. They are not being asked to consider all of the points that could potentially be made; indeed they should recognize that doing so will limit their ability to explore the points that they do raise in sufficient depth. Students need to be guided to reflect on, evaluate and select the most relevant ideas from the many that they have generated in the planning of their essay.

UNFOCUSED INTRODUCTION

Successful introductions tend to be dedicated to three main goals:

• establishing some clarity about the key terms and concepts used in the title
• stating a position, that is, agree, disagree, agree with reservations, disagree with reservations 
• identifying the WOKs and AOKs that the essay will focus on.

Essays that open with generalized observations about mankind’s eternal quest for knowledge tend to set the scene for a descriptive essay, and often cause the student to digress. These introductions also tend to cause readers to quickly lose faith in the purpose of the essay. 

Strong essay introductions ensure that they address all aspects of the title, and that they consider any assumptions that are written into the title. They do not assume that the title can only ever be addressed from one position. 

INEFFECTIVE USE OF EXAMPLES

Strong essays will seek to employ a range of specific examples (contemporary, drawn from personal experience, cross-cultural, from multiple eras, drawn from the course) and will make relevant use of them. When we refer to specific examples we mean making reference to a particular artist/artwork or scientist/scientific theory, rather than making a generic reference to “artists” or “scientists”. Effective examples invariably seek to relate the example back to the title, and to extend, fairly directly, from the example to the knowledge question that it was employed to illustrate. Students should avoid using hypothetical examples. Students who base their arguments on hypothetical examples that are invariably vague, unconvincing and anecdotal usually produce essays that fail to arrive at clear knowledge conclusions. 

Students should also avoid using too many examples. Students who approach the essay from a content perspective tend often to make the mistake of filling the essay with large numbers of examples, skipping from one to the other without unpacking the significance of each. This tends to make the essay more descriptive than analytical. 

FAILURE TO REFER TO WOKS AND AOKS

Students should identify which WOKs and AOKs their essay will focus on in their opening statements. It is crucial that students use the language of TOK appropriately, making explicit reference to the terms “ways of knowing” and “areas of knowledge.” 

CLAIMS ARE NOT FULLY EXPLORED AND EVALUATED

Strong students often fail to achieve full return for their efforts because they fail to fully develop the claims that they incorporate into their discussion, and fail to justify and evaluate those claims. 

COUNTERCLAIMS ARE IGNORED

Essays that explore counterclaims are more likely to approach the title as a debate about knowledge and are therefore less likely to make the mistake of treating the essay simply as one-sided statements of the student’s own viewpoint or opinion. 

FAILURE TO CONSIDER IMPLICATIONS

Many students fail to achieve the highest marks because although they make sound arguments, they fail to consider the implications of their arguments.