"Why do the best ToK essays get mediocre grades ?"

Today’s question was requested by a channel viewer, I hope that this situation has never happened to you, it’s certainly happened to me and my channel viewer a few times over the years.

The situation: Your ToK cohort has written essays across the range, at the top of the range are a handful of very able students who have been highly engaged in ToK. They have been enthusiastic, near absorbed, in the essay writing process - having frequent consultations with you, doing extra reading, extending their ToK knowledge beyond the class. They have written sophisticated essays that you have mentored them through. You send the essays off for assessment, and when you get the results these few students are graded at 4-5/10, whilst other competent, but far less stunning, essays have been graded 8-10. Why does this happen ?

I’ll go through some of the reasons why this might occur, and more importantly the steps that we can take to minimise it happening in the future.

Cause 1: Familiarity - missing out the basics.

Undoubtedly you, as the teacher, have been on the ToK journey of essay development with these students. You may have shared in their excitement at exploring new ways to answer the question, you will probably have participated in the development of their knowledge arguments, evaluations & implications with them. You have been a co-constructor, strictly adhering to academic integrity, with them. This leads to a high degree of familiarity with the final essay, its development and its meaning. 

Unfortunately this high degree of familiarity can lead to a potential degree of ‘holism’ on our part - we might see things in the essay which are not evident to those who have not been on that journey with us. For example we might see that definitions, clarifications, and limitations are inherent to that beautifully written knowledge argument because we were with the student at every iterative stage of the integration of those elements into the argument. However, the examiner who has not been on that 6 month journey with the student may not see that background. Now, I’m not saying the examiner is wrong - they mark what is in front of them, I’m saying that the problem lies with our human ability of interpretation - we can’t help but bring all of our schematic knowledge to an essay when we read it - as such it reads very differently to you as the teacher than it may read to a removed examiner. Unfortunately it’s an essay rather than a Viva Voce.

Covering the basics - the Examiners are asked to use Global Impression Marking - a holistic approach, but they are also asked to use an assessment rubric. One of the first things the examiners might do is to check that the basic elements of the assessment rubric are in place in order to place the essay in one of the marking bands. Those basic elements may no longer be sufficiently evident in an essay which has become highly developed over successive iterations. Those elements are evident to the teacher with the background knowledge, but may be too implicit for the examiner. Further, the examiner may have to make assumptions about the student’s understanding of those basic elements in order to credit them. An essay will not fair well if the examiner has had to attribute a number of assumptions to the student when using Global Impression Marking.

2. Tacit Assumptions

A second, possible, cause of the disappointing grade are the tacit assumptions of the teacher regarding the knowledge claims and evaluation points. As the highly engaged student iteratively develops their essay they may accept assumptions in one version of the essay in order to develop their argument in the next version. In the dialogue between the teacher & student it’s possible that the tacit acceptance of these assumptions are lost - obviously to the examiner they’ll just be ‘absent’.  

The challenge for the student is that they only have 1600 words to do something that’s very difficult. For the most able students it is very tempting to conflate arguments, concepts and evaluation points in order to meet the word limit. In doing so they risk somewhat ‘overegging’ the pudding - ie writing something that’s far more complicated than it needs to be, and possibly doesn’t evidence the basic requirements of the essay.

3. Seeds and Tolerance.

The final possible cause of the mediocre grades are to do with the mechanics of the examining procedure, specifically with the Seeding and tolerance processes. In order to ensure the reliability of the marking examiners are given essays which have already been marked by The Chief Examiner (these are called seeds), the seed appears to the examiner just like any other essay, and they have to mark it within 1 mark of the Chief Examiner’s mark to continue marking. If they mark more than 1 mark more / less than the CE mark they are deemed to be out of tolerance, and are suspended or withdrawn from marking for the remainder of the session.

When I was an examiner I was constantly ‘seed wary’ - I think this is the purpose of the system, and it’s a good thing. However, it does make you extra cautious when you see an atypical, or unusual, essay - all of the “Is this a seed ?” alarms go off at full volume. As such you can become extra cautious, only attributing that which is absolutely evident, and solidly justifiable. Now I know that this may not be the case for other examiners, they may not be ‘seed wary’, they may be confident in their assessment of atypical essays - I’m just being honest about my experience - and with most things in life - if it’s like that for you it’s probably like that for others too. 

So, it seems like I paint a fairly depressing picture - if you stopped reading now you could go away with the message that you shouldn’t let your most capable ToK students extend themselves. But that’s not my message at all. There are ways that those students can write extraordinary essays so long as we build in a few safety mechanisms - let’s move onto the solutions: 

Solutions: 

1. Signpost the basics.

The first solution is to have your students Signpost the basic elements (Definitions, Knowledge Arguments, evaluation, real world examples, implications). As the essay is developed they might remove the signpost labels (eg “My knowledge argument is”), but the signposted content needs to remain. They could highlight these basic elements in early iterations of their draft in order to ensure that they keep them in place in subsequent iterations. Before finally hand in you could ask them to recolour those basic elements to ensure that they are still in place.

Further, peer review of identification of those elements would also be very helpful both in the early and latter stages of the essay process.

2. Depth rather than breadth. 

The second solution applies to all students, but may be particularly pertinent for those students who are finding it difficult to fit all of their arguments into the 1600 word limit. Some of the Prescribed Titles contain multiple clauses, a number of assumptions, and various approaches inherent to answering the PT. It is generally better to develop a limited number of arguments in depth rather than to try to answer all possible aspects of the PT with far less depth - i.e. depth rather than breadth. It may be necessary to explicitly state which aspects of the PT will be challenged and why (ie signposting).

This is also of particular relevance if the student is tempted to conflate multiple aspects of the PT in order to cover a wider range of arguments - a general rule of thumb would be to focus on developing a substantial argument to a more conventional interpretation of the PT rather than conflation which runs the risk of an inadvertent rewriting of the PT - which will definitely lead to a mediocre grade, or potentially worse.

3. Blind Assessment & Blind Moderation.

This is possibly the most effective preventative measure that we can take as teachers. If we can undertake blind assessment procedures at the Draft stage, and possibly at final assessment stage we counterbalance some of those familiarity problems. At the most basic level just ask your students to submit their Drafts without their names on them, but obviously far more effective is to swap your class’s essays with other teachers at your school. If you’re the sole teacher at your school, or you have a small cohort then swap essays with others in your ToK network. We started to do this at my previous school a few years ago and the experience was revelatory for our team. We picked up on many problems in the essays from each other’s classes that we hadn’t seen until that point, it was also super useful to get colleagues' ideas on the approaches and content of the essay - this definitely had a significant positive effect on our essay scores. 

So, that’s my experience, and my suggestions for solutions. If you have differing experiences, or other solutions I’d love to hear them in the comments section. Today's blog was suggested by a TokToday subscriber, if you have questions or content that you would like me to cover please don't hesitate to get in touch (Daniel@TokToday.com),

Have a great day,
Daniel, Lisbon, Jan 2023