IB Biology HL Internal Assessment Example

The student stated a focused research question with a clear organism, variable, outcome measures, and time frame.

The student grounded the investigation in a relevant real-world context and showed awareness of why pH matters for plant growth.

The student's method includes enough detail in many places for a reader to understand how the investigation was carried out.

The context could be more specific to the exact experimental setup rather than moving quickly from Petri dishes to broad agricultural claims.

Some important controls and conditions were not fully explained, especially how the pH remained consistent over the experiment.

The procedure contains a few ambiguities, including changes in the setup partway through the investigation.

The student presents a substantial amount of processed data using means, standard deviations, graphs, and uncertainty displays.

The student communicates the structure of the data reasonably well and separates root and stem results clearly.

The student shows awareness that measurement and biological variation affect the reliability of the results.

Some of the presentation is awkward or indirect, especially where key raw data are moved out of the main report.

The statistical processing is not fully reliable because the test appears to use summary means rather than the full set of individual values.

The pattern in the data is not always interpreted carefully, especially where a non-linear trend is treated as if it were linear.