IB Physics HL Internal Assessment Example

The student poses a focused, quantitative research question with clearly defined variables and a relevant acoustic context.

The student includes several methodological details that make the investigation partially reproducible, such as the fixed frequency, repeated trials, recording length, and processing workflow.

The student shows awareness of important practical factors such as resonance length, humidity, and microphone behaviour.

The manipulation is not fully unambiguous because the wording alternates between air temperature and water temperature.

Several procedural details needed for full reproducibility are missing, including water volume, thermal equilibrium time, ambient conditions, and a standardised striking method.

The central methodological issue is not fully resolved: a fixed microphone position measures source damping much more directly than atmospheric attenuation.

The student communicates a coherent analysis workflow, including envelope extraction, logarithmic conversion to dB, regression, averaging across trials, and the use of figures and tables.

The student makes a meaningful attempt to address uncertainty by combining trial spread, instrument uncertainty, and control-recording information.

The data presentation is generally legible and structured, with labelled axes, trial values, and a worked example that helps the reader follow the process.

The uncertainty treatment omits several important sources, especially those linked to source excitation, AGC, background noise, and the fact that the control does not match the main measurement.

There are inconsistencies in the numerical processing, including a mismatch between the shown slope calculation and the final reported value.

The processing is not fully valid for the stated claim because the setup measures decay at one fixed point rather than a true atmospheric attenuation coefficient.