How to Get Full Marks On Your Business Internal Assessment

I have found that the biggest chal­lenge my stu­dents are hav­ing, in terms of scor­ing the top marks in the Busi­ness IA, is related to their use of ana­lyt­i­cal tools.

In gen­eral, you have a Research Ques­tion and you’re try­ing to arrive at your answer. A very com­mon mis­take is that stu­dents do a lot of analy­sis, but they don’t con­nect it prop­erly to the Research Ques­tion (RQ) or to their Answer (Ans).

I have wracked my brain to make this more straight­for­ward and I’ve come up with the fol­low­ing dia­gram, which you can fol­low to make your IA analy­sis a more straight­for­ward process. If you fol­low it, it should raise your per­for­mance in sev­eral aspects of the IA Busi­ness rubric.

By this point, you have cho­sen an appro­pri­ate RQ. if you aren’t sure about that, I rec­om­mend read­ing this arti­cle first (and fol­low the ‘4 tests’ it advises to check your RQ).  So now you know that you need to do a few things. You need to get an answer to your RQ, you need to do a lot of analy­sis and you need to do a lot of research. Where most peo­ple go wrong is con­nect­ing these things prop­erly. For exam­ple, many stu­dents Answers (their Find­ings) are not clearly related to their analy­sis at all. There is no clear link between their analy­sis and their even­tual Answer. By fol­low­ing the model I’m sug­gest­ing you won’t make this mistake.

There are also three aspects to an analysis

1Con­nect your ana­lyt­i­cal method (i.e. PEST, Deci­sion Tree) to your RQ. Make it clear HOW this method is needed if you are to answer your ques­tion. Again some types of analy­sis will be more suit­able for your spe­cific RQ. You can­not sim­ply do any old type of analy­sis. It is impor­tant that you do the right type of analy­sis, the analy­sis that answers your question.

2Per­form the analy­sis cor­rectly (and care­fully), show­ing you know the pur­pose of it. Be very care­ful to do a cor­rect job of using the model. Fill in all of the boxes (i.e. of your SWOT), or care­fully do your NPV cal­cu­la­tions, explain­ing your work as you go.

3Finally, after you have com­pleted each method, comment on your find­ings in a way that relates directly to your Answer. Do briefly after each analy­sis (i.e. after your IRR cal­cu­la­tion and after your Boston Matrix). You don’t need to tell us every­thing that you’ve just shown us. Just sum­ma­rize the main find­ings which relate to your Answer. The idea is that, by the time we get to your actual final con­clu­sion, your con­clu­sion is actu­ally obvi­ous to the reader.

This makes for a good report, which would be more use­ful to your man­ager because you’ve shown the man­ager, step-by-step 1) Why this analy­sis is nec­es­sary, 2) What the analy­sis shows, and 3) How that analy­sis relates to what the Busi­ness should actu­ally do. You have there­fore made it easy to under­stand and more con­vinc­ing.

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