IB Physics HL Internal Assessment Example

The student states a focused research question with clearly identified independent and dependent variables.

The student includes relevant scientific background and uses published context to frame the investigation.

The student's method includes enough structure, controls, and repeated measurements that the overall experimental plan can be followed.

The scientific context contains some inaccurate or oversimplified claims, especially about how temperature affects water density and how that links to refractive index.

Some important geometric and procedural details are missing, so another researcher could not reproduce the setup without making assumptions.

A few controls are not realistically achievable as written, so they need to be made more precise or replaced with measurable conditions.

The student's tables and sample calculations make the processing pathway visible from raw measurements to refractive index and trend analysis.

The student makes a genuine effort to address uncertainty through apparatus values, error bars, and uncertainty propagation.

The student's processing includes the core steps needed for the investigation, such as averaging repeated trials, converting measurements, and fitting a relationship.

Some calculations contain significant errors or inconsistencies, especially in the quartile work and the uncertainty values.

The optical processing does not fully account for all relevant refractions in the setup, which weakens the accuracy of the calculated refractive indices.

The graph and notation are not consistently precise, so parts of the analysis are harder to interpret than they should be.