The Secret to a Top Scoring IB Essay
As a teacher and tutor I specialize in helping students write top-scoring essays. I wanted to share with you a helpful way to think about this, which will help you show strong critical thinking --something that often counts for close to 50% of your essay grade, so you can do well, even if you don’t work with me as your tutor.
First, let’s notice that there are 3 very different actvities required to create a great analytical essay. You need to:
- Gather relevant evidence,
- Present an argument, grounded in that evidence. And then
- Weigh up those arguments to write a judgement that seems very well-supported.
If you do those 3 things thoughtfully you can definitely get a 7 (or an A, if it's TOK or your EE).
We can think of those 3 activities as relating to 4 different roles you need to play: You need to
- Be a Detective,
- Be a Lawyer,
- Be a second Lawyer, who disagrees with the first one. And then
- Be a Judge.
The detective work is about gathering evidence and rea...
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