Top 10 Tips from an IB L&L Team Leader Examiner

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Tip one, retire the overdone texts.

[00:00:02]Gatsby's roaring twenties, Romeo and Juliet's love and hate, Macbeth's ambition. They're great to read, but not to study. They kill originality and make cheating way too easy. Their PR L is huge, use [music] it. Tip two, spot AI slop. Check the process, not just the final product. Look for fake binaries, vacuous figurative language, short disjointed paragraphs, and those pseudo-academic verbs that mean absolutely nothing. Tip three, teach non-lit exactly as you would a literary text. It is not a self-study task.

[00:00:31]Structured whole-class inquiry only for non-lit as well. Tip four, an IB response must add to the literal meaning. Three things: implications for criterion A, connotations for criterion B, and an argument criterion C. If you're just describing the text, you're stuck at two out of five. Tip five, skip secondary sources. Unless it's an EE, IB tasks aren't [music] research essays.

[00:00:53]Build your own argument from the text first. Parroting Foucault never saved a weak analysis. Tip six, [music] essays are about ideas, not authorial choices.

[00:01:01]Topic sentence that names a technique has already lost the argument. Concept leads, AC follows. Tip seven, teach your students to elaborate on ideas, not just name. Move them from friendship to what kind it [music] is, why it matters, and what the writer is claiming. The stages of ideas gives them that structure. Tip eight, teach deconstruction, not just identification. Give them the three-step technique. Identify the choice, deconstruct its specific connotations, link it to an [music] idea. Tip nine, give your students a method to build an argument. DDM, deconstruct, [music] dichotomize, merge. One strong connotation, one binary pair, one real thesis. Tip 10, rule of thumb, if they could have said it in year six, [music] they need to cut it in year 12. Blue equals sad is a year six thought. DP students need more. That's the 10. Tools to fix all this, stages of ideas, DDM, the three-step technique, and more [music] in the description. Help your students to stop describing and start adding.