IB Extended Essay Tutor

The International Baccalaureate (IB) Extended Essay is a compulsory, externally assessed independent research essay within the IB Diploma Programme core, with an upper limit of 4,000 words covering the introduction, body, conclusion and any quotations. Students sitting the Diploma from May 2027 are marked against the IB's revised Extended Essay subject brief, first published for that assessment session, on a total scale of 0 to 34.

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The essay is one of three compulsory core elements of the Diploma Programme, alongside theory of knowledge and creativity, activity, service, and every Diploma student completes it regardless of their choice of the other six subjects. Combined performance across the Extended Essay and theory of knowledge contributes up to three additional points towards the overall Diploma score. Two-year DP schools set their own internal deadlines for each stage of the essay ahead of the IB's own submission date, so the working timetable varies from school to school.

What the Extended Essay Requires

The Extended Essay asks students to frame an original research question, pursue it independently across primary and secondary sources, and construct a sustained analytical argument within the 4,000-word limit. It is not an extended internal assessment: examiners expect genuine intellectual ownership, from a question that is answerable within scope to an argument that develops rather than describes.

Before research begins, the IB directs students to choose their pathway: a subject-focused essay written within one of the student's six Diploma subjects, or an interdisciplinary World Studies essay that combines two Diploma subjects to examine a single issue of contemporary global significance. Whichever pathway a student chooses, the methodology expected shifts with the subject. A History essay is judged on engagement with historiography and source evaluation; a Biology essay is judged on primary data collection or rigorous analysis of existing data; and a Language A Literature essay is judged on close textual analysis. Examiners assess whether the approach fits the discipline, not only whether the writing is competent.

Example Research Questions the IB Publishes

The IB's own Extended Essay subject brief, published for the specification first assessed in May 2027, sets out worked examples of the kind of research question that meets the assessment criteria. None of these appear on a typical tutor-marketplace results page, but they are useful benchmarks for how narrow and answerable a strong research question needs to be.

The IB does not publish an example research question for every Diploma subject, and a strong question in any subject shares the same shape: focused enough to answer with evidence inside 4,000 words, rather than broad enough only to describe a topic.

Where Students Most Often Go Wrong

The most common and most damaging failure is a research question that is too broad or too descriptive. A question such as ‘What were the causes of the First World War?’ cannot be answered analytically within 4,000 words — it produces a narrative summary that scores poorly on analysis and line of argument regardless of how well it is written. The question must be focused enough to permit a genuine, evidenced argument.

• Overly broad research questions that lead to descriptive rather than analytical essays
• Weak engagement with sources — summarising what sources say rather than evaluating their significance, reliability, or limitations
• Absent or underdeveloped argument — presenting information without a clear line of reasoning that the essay is actively defending
• Poor structure — sections that do not connect logically, or a conclusion that simply restates the introduction
• Missing or incomplete required elements — the IB's subject brief lists a title page, contents page, introduction, body, conclusion, and references and bibliography as the required elements of the final submission; leaving one out, or formatting citations inconsistently, costs marks under the framework criterion
• Process failure — leaving the bulk of research and writing until close to the school's internal deadline, which produces rushed, underdeveloped work

An essay that scores well is rarely the most ambitious one in the group; it is usually the most disciplined, built around a question the student could realistically answer with the evidence available to them.

How the Assessment Is Marked

All extended essays are externally assessed by IB examiners, never by the student's own school, and marked on a scale of 0 to 34. The mark maps onto a grade band from A, work of an excellent standard, down to E, work of an elementary standard.

For the specification first assessed in May 2027, the IB marks the essay against five criteria: framework for the essay (whether the research question, research methods and structural conventions provide an effective framework), knowledge and understanding (of the subject matter used in the research), analysis and line of argument (whether the student analyses the information and produces a line of argument), discussion and evaluation (whether the student discusses the findings and evaluates the essay), and reflection (whether the student evaluates the effect of the extended essay experience on them as a learner). The IB's public subject brief sets out the guiding question behind each criterion but does not publish the individual mark allocation for each one.

Reflection, the RPF and the Viva Voce

Reflection is assessed as its own criterion, and the IB tracks it through three mandatory, formal reflection sessions between a student and their supervisor. The final of these is the viva voce, a concluding interview of 10–15 minutes that checks academic integrity and asks the student to reflect on the successes and difficulties of the research process.

Students record their reflective thinking as a 500-word reflective statement, written at the end of the process and included on the Reflection and progress form — a form the IB now calls the RPF, which also logs attendance at each of the three sessions. Earlier guidance called the same document the Reflections on Planning and Progress Form, or RPPF; the name has changed but the underlying requirement has not, and examiners read the form alongside the essay.

For a fuller week-by-week walkthrough of the whole process, from first ideas to final submission, see our Extended Essay guide.

How Tuition Helps — and What It Cannot Do

A Leading Tuition tutor works with you at every stage of the process: refining your research question until it is genuinely focused and answerable, planning an argument structure before you begin writing, identifying relevant and credible sources, and reviewing drafts to improve analytical depth, clarity, and expression. Tutors with subject expertise can identify where your reasoning is underdeveloped, where your engagement with sources is superficial, and where your argument loses coherence — and explain how to address each of these problems.

What a tutor cannot do is write any part of the essay for you. The IB's academic integrity policy is explicit, and the work submitted — including the reflective statement — must be entirely the student's own. Our specialist tutors understand the difference between developing a student's thinking and doing their thinking for them: every session is directed at building understanding and skills, so that the essay and the reflective statement a student submits are genuinely theirs, and genuinely strong.

For full curriculum information and assessment details, see the official IBO Extended Essay guide.

Reviewed September 2026: word limit, assessment criteria, reflection process (RPF) and diploma points checked against the IB's Extended Essay subject brief and ibo.org.

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