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

A TokToday viewer has asked me to cover the reasons why (in their experience) the best ToK Essays are often awarded mediocre grades. In this video I also cover some of the preventative measures that we can take to avoid this situation.
For more information please go to: toktoday.com/2023/01/16/why-d...
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[@patronus7153]

your videos are amazing !!!!!! They have helped me so much !

[@toktoday7978]

I'm glad that they're helpful. Many thanks for your kind words.

[@flummox69]

Hey, so as an examiner in the midst of grading TOK essays right now (as I've done every spring for the past 5 years), I find this video especially interesting.Great clarity and awareness of the process and its many complicated facets. Good for you, really. Some advice. Firstly, I'm assuming what you're laying down here is meant to be food for thought for both teachers and students. It works on both levels. I'm sure you've thought of this, but waling the audience through some anonymously submitted sample portions of student essays that clearly exemplify the problem of 'familiarity' would really be helpful. It's a very complex 'problem' (as your long explanation indicates) and would really benefit from illustration. What's being presumed and/or glossed over that the examiner might object to or not pick up on? 2) A persistent problem over the years, and certainly one rearing its head this go-round, is the OVER-INTELLECTUALIZED WRITING STYLE assumed by some students. It's poisonous. Many kids feel they must adopt the style of some post-grad working on a doctoral thesis to legitimize their essays. Simpler is always better. A very very hard bit of advice to get kids to buy into, for many reasons. But it's really frequent that essays with solid examples and claims at their cores are 'overdressed' w verbiage, malapropisms and stunningly overcomplicated syntax. Add to that over-complicated claims that drift into areas tangential to the PT's scope. It's a killer of many a good paper. The '9' essays strike a balance between clarity and elegance...the writing can be 'complex' and occasionally stilted and 'professorial', but, in the end, always clear. How to get kids to evaluate their prose for clarity is a magic trick I don't know how to convey. 3) You seem to be implying that the 'anomalous' superior essay is down-graded because its approach or claims or examples are 'outside the box' for whatever reasons, especially the ones you try to address in the video. I, for one, embrace the anomalous paper, as it's a refreshing break from the routine of assessing the 'mundanely' organized and predictable essays that are the norm. I'm sure many examiners feel the same way, though no way to prove it. 4) Re: 'Seed wariness' as a reason for depressing the scores of exceptional papers.....A point very well taken for exactly the reasons you mention. However, as you know, the software allows 'submitted' essays to be 'edited'. It is not uncommon for me to be cautious in awarding a grade and, after discovering it's NOT a seed, to go back and award it an additional point - what it's 'really' worth. I'd say I do that w roughly 20% of the papers I submit because when I'm 'out of tolerance' or 'in tolerance' w seed papers, it's almost always because my judgment is +1 or more off the mark. Keep up the good work....All considered, Level 5. Cheers.

[@toktoday7978]

Thank you for such a detailed comment. This has given me much food for thought, and some excellent ideas for future videos. This video was requested by a teacher, and I think that it's largely written for teachers. I wanted to address the main complaint that I hear about the examining process ("it's totally unreliable"). Having examined ToK before e-marking, and then with e-marking I think that the reliability has significantly improved. The anomalous essay issue is complicated. They used to produce "Notes for Examiners" before we started marking (not sure if they still do). I think that these notes limited the scope of 'acceptable' responses to some degree. However, I was not aware of the option to edit scores of submitted essays..., interesting. Again, thanks for the comment, undoubtedly we will return to this essay again soon.

[@toddcrane9602]

Nice video. You do an admirable job dissecting the ways in which examiner scores may differ from the classroom teacher's evaluation of ToK essays. Let me stress one point you raised. Students need to write a ToK paper. They are not writing a philosophy paper or a subject area paper. They a writing a ToK paper and within that expectation they are writing a version of a ToK paper. As you rightly say, the prescribed titles are open to any number of approaches and it's important that student choose an approach and stick with it. I tell my students that they can't do it all so they should only attempt to some of it and to do that well. Students and teachers should constantly remind themselves that they are producing a ToK paper and that they need to make it absolutely obvious to the examiner that that is what was produced. I'll also add that it is possible that the examiner's score is simply wrong.Each examiner reads 200+ essays and they are human and will make mistakes. Conservatively, it's reasonable that an examiner's mark is "wrong" for about 5% of their allotment and that these wrongly marked essays are not seeds. So, if each examiner produces about 10 "wrong" scores then it means that there are literally hundreds of ToK essays that are incorrectly scored every session. Of course the odds are that any one essay is not marked incorrectly, but if you teach ToK long enough it's a near certainty that a teacher and an examiner will disagree about a score or two and that the teacher is more accurate than the examiner.

[@toktoday7978]

Thank you for your detailed and insightful comment Todd, I very much agree with the points that you raise. I often see papers that are too subject focussed with insufficient discussion of ToK. With regards to examiner mistakes I think that signposting can help to minimise the likelihood of that, but it is of course a possibility regardless. EUR's are always an option, but in my experience rarely used in ToK - most students just accepting that if they've passed ToK "that's sufficient".

[@flummox69]

@@toktoday7978 As an examiner in the midst of grading TOKs right now, I'd say this: 1) given the subjective nature of the process, it has been my observation after grading 220+ essays for the past 5 years that even 'seed' papers and 'practice and qualifying' papers are graded WRONG by senior examiners. Not often, but it happens, and sometimes - from my very subjective viewpoint - these sr. examiners' judgements are quite off the mark. In general, it's a fair and somewhat objective system, but these aberrations do create a sense of a machine w inherent hiccups built in when it comes to judging kids' 'great' essays. No way of avoiding subjectivity and unpredictable results. I'm assuming EURs are requests that papers be re-considered by IB after students have received them? If so, when I was a TOK teacher (retired now for a good handful of years) I routinely submitted papers I thought were too harshly judged. (it's costly, if I recall, and have no idea whether this option's still available). Occasionally, the re-submitted essays were raised a point or two.