IB English: Paper One - Political Cartoon - Student Sample - FULL RESPONSE - SCORE 7

[@kexingarianali38]

it's just scary to know my schoolmates are capable of writing such great essays in such limited time...

[@ibenglishguys]

You can also do it!

[@ibenglishguys]

Do what you can and strive to grow as a writer and thinker! Use these as models to do better for yourself. You can do it!

[@omplat4113]

Was this written during the actual IB exam, or was it an assignment? I find it extremely difficult to believe that this was written during the paper 1 IB exam, as it's way too sophisticated and has too many words for a one-hour task; in fact, I asked my teacher and he thinks the exact same thing. He said that the standards aren't this high for a 7.

[@ibenglishguys]

Hi there. Thanks for the question. This was a response written during a 75 minute class period. This is how long we have class at our school and we gave this cartoon as a class assessment after spending time working with cartoons. This was an unseen cartoon similar to what one might see in an IB Exam and we gave the exact directions and time conditions so our students could see how they could perform. This student is highly capable and produced this response, hand-written. The response was then typed up as it was written so we could show it to you. Don’t be intimidated by the length. The standard for 7 is not only how much students write but it is the degree of insight and deep analysis. Hope this clarifies.

[@prata6938]

I was advised not to include knowledge not already present in the text. But i noticed you guys seem to bring it up quite often when discussing the different texts. So are we allowed to bring in outside knowledge of the issue/topic other than what's presented in the text? For example, you guys bring up the use of the colour red, and how that relates to the red and blue states in America. Are we allowed to do that in the essay? Cus if someone doesn't follow American politics, they might not know what red and blue states are.

[@davidgiles5399]

Brien, You bring up an excellent point. In my opinion, you should use your knowledge of topic to help you understand a text that you read. This is actually what we we all of the time when we encounter a text. This is called schema and is a very powerful way to understand what we read. That said, the IB goes to great lengths to choose text that do not require a great deal of contextual knowledge to understand a text. This cartoon, like you mention, does require an understanding of the political situation in the USA and is very political in nature. Consequently, this would NOT be an appropriate text for an IB exam as it might unfairly advantage students from one particular region of the world. You can imagine that it is very difficult to choose an appropriate text for a global audience as any text must come from somewhere. We chose this text in our class and thought it made a very good text for our students to tackle even though we are not in the USA (We’re in Thailand). Our students are quite aware of situation in North Korea and also about the polarization in the USA. Hope this helps. Thanks for bringing this up.

[@DJTejasMusic28]

Knowledge of context is no longer graded on paper 1. Using external information might very well develop your arguments but we're supposed to develop arguments based on what is in the text, not outside it. Furthermore, irrespective of how good language used in the paper is, repeating the message instead of evaluating the techniques that develop it will probably not score well on the IB :) An analysis like the one you just showed is nearly impossible without significant contextual understanding, which isn't a requirement.

[@ibenglishguys]

Hi DJ, Thanks for the comment and engaging with the text. The Paper 1 rubric calls for students to examine the implications of a text and to us, this means to read between the lines and consider the time and space in which the text is written as well as other subtleties. Remember that no text is written in a vacuum and that time and space is one of the three Areas of Exploration for our course. Lang and Lit is rooted in the real world. That is what is so cool about it. Your knowledge of a topic can help you examine those implications. If you have a text on climate change, your knowledge of this topic is helpful. If an article comes from India, if you know something about the religious and cultural diversity in that country can help you think about implications. Like I told Brian in my comment below, this cartoon is political in nature and does require the reader to know something about US politics and North Korea. The idea of political polarization is a fairly well known and common topic. While the IB would not choose this for an IB exam, the cartoon worked very well for our diverse group of international students, the majority of whom are not American and live in Asia. We want to provide different texts and text types that are not always IB exam texts. The paper we provided is excellent and to us as examiners would score very well. Thanks again and hopefully this clarifies our choice of text and our feelings about contextual knowledge. Hope you are finding the channel helpful because that is our goal!

[@EllhamNasser]

Can you do a video responding to a not so good grade and explain how to avoid mistakes ?

[@ibenglishguys]

Great idea.