ToK Expectations

OFS The­ory of Knowledge

In the TOK Depart­ment, we expect you to

1. Arrive on time to lessons with all nec­es­sary books. This includes bring­ing your notes and jour­nal to every lesson.

2. Give your full atten­tion and par­tic­i­pate in class

3. Ask ques­tions when you do not understand

4. Be coop­er­a­tive and have a pos­i­tive attitude

5. Com­plete all assign­ments and home­work within the set timeAv­oid behav­iour which inter­feres with or dis­cour­ages other stu­dents learn­ing effectively

6. Fol­low the school’s pol­icy on Aca­d­e­mic Honesty

7. Not bring food or drinks into the class­room, but water is permitted.

Assign­ments

Home­work assign­ments will be set reg­u­larly.  Home­work will be in the form of either a writ­ten piece of work or a pre­sen­ta­tion to be given on a topic.  Writ­ten assign­ments must be sub­mit­ted at the begin­ning of the les­son on the due date. If a writ­ten assign­ment is handed in late, the school home­work pol­icy will apply and the max­i­mum grade of 2 will be obtain­able. It is expected that the piece of work will be sub­mit­ted, even if it is late, so you may be kept in after school to com­plete tasks that have not be sub­mit­ted. Pre­sen­ta­tions are to be made as assigned by the teacher. If a pre­sen­ta­tion can­not be made on the expected date with­out an accept­able rea­son, in most instances, you would not be able to make a later presentation.

If you have dif­fi­culty with an assign­ment, it is your respon­si­bil­ity to seek help from your teacher, before the due date.

Assess­ment Weight­ing, Quar­ter Grades and Semes­ter Grades

There are two major cat­e­gories of assessment: formative assess­ment and summative assessment.

For­ma­tive assess­ment is about help­ing you to learn. Sum­ma­tive assess­ment is about find­ing out what you have learned.

For­ma­tive assess­ment nor­mally involves every­day home­work tasks and your input into class discussions.

Sum­ma­tive assess­ment involves larger pieces of work and will be graded against the TOK criteria.

When your teacher gen­er­ates your quar­ter grade, for­ma­tive assess­ments are weighted at 60% and sum­ma­tive assess­ments are weighted at 40%. for the first semes­ter. In the sec­ond semes­ter the weight­ings will reverse with for­ma­tive assess­ments weighted at 40% and sum­ma­tive assess­ments weighted at 60%

Semes­ter grades are weighted as fol­lows: 50% from the first quar­ter grade, 50% from the sec­ond quarter.

Pla­gia­rism

Stu­dents are encour­aged to dis­cuss their assign­ments with class­mates, friends and fam­ily. It is stressed, how­ever, that they must write/produce the WHOLE assign­ment on their own. If any PART of the assign­ment is iden­ti­cal with that of another stu­dent, this is con­sid­ered a breach of the Aca­d­e­mic Hon­esty code, and the assign­ment will not be accepted. The stu­dent will be sent to the IB Diploma Coordinator.

IB Assess­ment

Part 1 Exter­nal assess­ment (40 points) 

Essay on a pre­scribed title (1,200–1,600 words)

One essay on a title cho­sen from a list of ten titles pre­scribed by the IBO for each exam­i­na­tion session.

Part 2 Inter­nal assess­ment (20 points) 

The pre­sen­ta­tion (approx­i­mately 10 min­utes per student)

One pre­sen­ta­tion to the class.

One writ­ten pre­sen­ta­tion plan­ning doc­u­ment and pre­sen­ta­tion mark­ing form.

• the knowl­edge issue that is the focus of the presentation

• a sum­mary in note form of the knowl­edge issues to be treated dur­ing the presentation

• achieve­ment lev­els for each of the four assess­ment cri­te­ria, briefly jus­ti­fied, from both stu­dent and teacher.

These assess­ment pieces will be deliv­ered by the can­di­date in the sec­ond year (Grade 12) of the IB diploma.

TOK Points

Points awarded for the exter­nally assessed com­po­nent, part 1, the essay on a pre­scribed title (40 points), and for the inter­nally assessed com­po­nent, part 2, the pre­sen­ta­tion (20 points), are com­bined to give a total out of 60 points. The grade bound­aries are then applied , to deter­mine the band (a to E) to which the student’s per­for­mance in TOK belongs.

The band descrip­tors are:

A — Work of an excellent standard

B – Work of a good standard

C – Work of a satisfactory standard

D – Work of a mediocre standard

E – Work of an elementary standard

Each IB diploma can­di­date is eli­gi­ble for up to three bonus points, depend­ing on their results in TOK and Extended Essay [EE]. The result is based on a matrix of points from each component.

F* means that 28 points over­all would be required to be eli­gi­ble for the diploma if a stu­dent attains an E grade in either TOK or EE.

F means an auto­matic fail­ure of the diploma.