What are the IB changes May 2021 ?
Contents
What are the IB changes for May 2021? 1
Route 3: Postponement or delay 1
First of all, before briefing you on the changes what IB has come up with let’s throw light on the flexible and rational approach of IB in helping the recognized schools and students to cope up with the pandemic. IBO has shown its well-known mutually respectful nature of not being authoritative, rather throwing the decision-making ball to each school’s court in deciding on its most feasible assessment pathway.Â
IB has shown three routes for May 2021 exam, either of which schools can adopt based on the local pandemic scenario, providing the students with the best possible assessment mode even in these difficult times.
Remember that you, being an IB student, are not the decision-maker in either writing the exam, or going with the non-exam route, or deferring to take the exams. It’s after all your school’s decision for which each IB school would convey its decisions to the IBO by the end of March, 2021.
Route 1: Written Exams
For the May 2021 IB exams, based on a survey report almost 71% of schools (with 61% students) have confirmed that they can safely administer the IB exams, which gives us a cogent evidence that many schools are adopting the traditional exam pathway.Â
The operations involved:
The May 2021 IBDP written exam format would be the same as earlier.
Oral language assessment would be conducted through video calls.
Listening components of IB language exams would be tentative in 2022.
You can do a presentation for DP theory of knowledge (TOK), extended essay (EE) and global politics HL internal assessments (IAs) through the digital interface of zoom or skype.
Route 2: Non-Exam Route
The alternative non-exam route is adopted by the schools who may find it infeasible to take the risk of administering the exam beating the pandemic odds. In such cases, the score would be based on the combined component of internal assessment coursework and the teacher-predicted grades.
Route 3: Postponement or delay
It is left to the schools to consider a defer of the May 2021 exam to the November 2021 or May 2022 session with no additional cost or with a full refund from the IBO for rescheduling their presence in the May 2021 series.
The grading system:
IB has confirmed of reasonably accommodating generosity in designing the grade boundaries, for the simple fact that there has been involuntary interruption in the complete teaching-learning process due to the pandemic. It has also considered the recognized grade distribution for the higher education.
For the non-exam route, the teachers would submit their predicted grades for each candidate as per the IB guidelines.Â
Based on the simple input that May 2020 predicted grades were higher than the other years, IBO has taken up a rational decision of revaluating the grades of the students in case of disparity between a student’s performance from the predicted grade distributions. In such cases, IB would allow schools to raise a request for a different grade distribution substantiating their claims.
Thanks to its extensive coursework IB would be transparent enough in distributing the grades between the students and schools for a self and comparative evaluation.
How to prepare yourself for IBDP exam during COVID?
Make sure which route your school is adopting. Accordingly, you can focus on the tools.
Get access to the revision packs and crash courses prepared by the IB examiners so that you exactly know how to approach the questions.
Always remember the right approach can only be possible with the understanding of the assessment criteria. So, even if you need handholding see to it that you approach the expert IB facilitators at the right time.
