IB Physics HL Internal Assessment Example

The student states a focused, quantitative research question with clear variables, a fixed measurement point, and a defined method.

The student's investigation is grounded in relevant physics and the practical setup is specific enough to be followed with only minor ambiguity.

The student shows awareness of control variables and justifies key design choices with reference to the underlying model.

The method is not fully reproducible because some procedural details are missing or inconsistent.

The student's assumption of a single drag coefficient for different balls is too simplified and is not fully justified.

Some design limitations are acknowledged later, but they are not explained clearly enough at the planning stage.

The student's tables and calculations are clearly organized and make it easy to follow the flow from raw measurements to processed results.

The student includes uncertainty treatment, repeated trials, and graphical presentation with labelled axes and uncertainty bars.

The student communicates much of the processing with enough precision that the main analysis can be followed accurately.

Some uncertainty estimates are not fully justified or are inconsistent with the rest of the analysis.

The treatment of horizontal uncertainties is incomplete and does not fully match the way the graphs are interpreted.

There are important issues in the linearization and statistical interpretation that weaken the reliability of the processing.