How to Make Your Good Extended Essay Great
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know I’m all about finding systems and structures to make challenging things less challenging. Or, to put it more simply, I like to do things the easy way. To that end, I want to show you how to make a few tweaks to your average extended essay and earn top marks for it.
The following are some advanced techniques that many International Baccalaureate (IB) extended essay supervisors might forget to share. And many aren’t aware of them.
Before reading this blog post, I suggest reading my post on getting started with your extended essay. That article explains how to choose a good essay question, among other things. This article is about advanced techniques, the polish that can raise your grades (to a high B or an A). But if your foundation is off no amount of polishing is going to be enough. So again, make sure you get off to a good start.
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1) Doubt Your Sources
By now your Extended Essay contains the best sources that you could get yo...
How to Structure a Theory of Knowledge (TOK) Presentation
The following Theory of Knowledge (TOK) presentation structure has been designed very carefully. (It’s taken several years of conversations!) It’s easy for you to follow and ticks all the boxes.
I'm going to tell you how many slides to have (nine), what text should go on each slide (less is more) and what you should talk about while each slide is up (focus on the interesting parts).
A clear structure like this is essential because it helps the audience follow what you’re saying. It also keeps you from wasting time, both during your presentation and in your preparation phase.
(This is also done for the TOK Essay, here).Â
There are a few things I need to go over before we get into the slides.
The Development Section
When you get into the Development section (where the knowledge question is explored and analyzed with reference to the AOKs and WOKs), you’ll see that we use a Claim, Counterclaim, Mini-Conclusion structure. We do this (claim, counterclaim, mini-conclusion) for each of ...
The CUEGIS Answer Method
Here is my step-by-step method for answering these questions, to make sure you get full marks on the exam. Remember, this one question can easily bring you up an ENTIRE GRADE level, if you do it right. It's worth 10% of the whole course.Â
First, know that you will have about 34 minutes for this question.
The CUEGIS methodÂ
The body will address each concept, but mostly just one concept at a time. The basic model you’ll follow will be repeatedly doing the normal answer method stuff (CTs, CLs and SWs), but in this case the course theory is your normal insights from the course (as always), but ALSO your insights into the concept. So keep making links to your company as well as your insights about the concepts (i.e. innovation, or strategy) while also linking your answer to normal insights from the course (i.e. Ansoff's matrix).Â
CLÂ = Case Link. Give a fact about your chosen company and the first concept.
CT = Course Theory. Use a keyword, tool or idea from the course to develop your...
Advanced Business Extended Essay Research
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When looking for advanced information, be careful to only pull in details that are somehow relevant to your research question (RQ). It's worth spending some time exploring different types of sources --rather than just the first page of Google results.
A few techniques to improve the quality of your research:
1) Break your RQ into sub-RQ's
If your question is, "Should Amazon invest 10 billion dollars in nuclear power?" ask yourself (and people at the company) what are the questions that need to be answered before that major question can be answered. For example maybe, for this business, the questions are:
- Can they afford it?
- Is it going to improve the satisfaction of their customers and
- Is it going to help us improve their market share?
For another business, they might be more interested in improving their efficiency, or brand image. The sub-questions help you focus your research and make sure you're seeking out information that is relevant. Sub-questions also help you jus...
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