Grade   Boundaries

                                    7           75-100%

                                    6           65-74%

                                    5           55-64%

                                    4           43-54%

                                    3           32-42%

                                    2           21-31%

                                    1            0-20%

Remember that these marks are those given after moderation etc. When you mark your own students’ work hopefully you will be marking to roughly the same standard but it will not be exactly the same as the external examiners’ marks.

The grade boundaries can be found in the Chief Examiners Reports which are published in the resources section of My IB after each examination session has completely finished. As an example the raw marks for the May 2018 TZ2 boundaries and the May 2019 TZ2 boundaries are given below to show the actual grade boundaries for those two sessions by component and the overall grade boundaries. (The total overall grade boundaries for the comparable TZ1 papers are given in red). You can see that there is some considerable difference as overall it would appear that the papers in May 2019 were easier when compared to those of May 2018 so higher marks were required to achieve the grade descriptors for each grade. Note that these figures have not been updated to include the 2020 and 2021 boundaries as these examination sessions are atypical as they were severely disrupted due to the pandemic.

In the old syllabus (examined before May 2016) the weighting of the papers was slightly different. For example Paper 2 at SL formed 32% of the total and the IA counted for 24% of the total.  Under the current syllabus the IA only counts for 20% of the total mark whereas the weighting of Paper 2 has increased to 40% at SL. Since the change of syllabus there was a slight lowering of the total percentage required to get a specific grade but it is only very small and in fact in May 2019 this trend was reversed.  Since it varies from year to year (and from time zone to time zone) depending upon the difficulty of the examination it is probably not very significant and the approximations given above are still a good working assumption.