dragomir Posted April 1, 2009 Report Share Posted April 1, 2009 (edited) hi there! im being curious about one thing so i decided that this would be the best place to post it, explain my situation and ask for your opinion, as fellow IB students. I'm just after finishing my physics HL internal assessments. it's pretty late as far as they have to be sent soon but this is all because of our physics teacher. We started doing our IA's at the beginning of this school year and when most of us had them finished our professor came back from some conference in Paris and he said that he misunderstood the guidelines and that all of our internal assessments are wrong. that was really shocking, especially that we hadn't much time left for doing them one more time. But we did. They are of course of much lower quality than they could be if we had more time but that's not the point. Our professor apologized and there was basically no problem... ... until the day it was revealed that ALL guidelines for ALL group 4 subjects were changed for 2009 examination and other teachers (biology and chemistry) knew about it from the very beginning. Our professor got into trouble and everyone was mad. Although we had already finished our works so there was nothing we could do. That's the story, now my question - when our professor came back from this conference he told us some "weird" new rules like: the research question must be in the form "how is x dependent on y", that the relation in the investigation must be linearized etc. I said "weird" because we weren't used to things like that, we made our previous internals more complex and this was like a huge limitation for us. Moreover for many people it seemed strange so I ask - do you have such rules too? I don't trust my professor, sad but true, but how can i know that he didn't mess something up one more time? Another, maybe more basic question is: did the rules actually change? I couldn't find any info on that on the internet (well, maybe my search wasn't too profound) I'm curious and afraid as well - what if we got these new internals wrong and the moderation will make our grades much lower? :( they are already not so good and i can't imagine they are lowered, that would be a tragedy :( should i be afraid? thanks for any responses! Edited April 1, 2009 by dragomir Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sandwich Posted April 1, 2009 Report Share Posted April 1, 2009 Wellllll we've done all of our IAs exactly as previous years have done them. There are only so many ways to do an experiment write-up (and don't worry-- our teachers supposedly knew what they were doing and I did all of my Chemistry IAs along with half my Biology IAs in the final 3 weeks of the year, along with all my orals!!). Following standard write-ups for Physics (Aim, Hypothesis, Method, Variables & Controls, Background Info., Apparatus, Results, Result Analysis, Conclusion, Evaluation, Improvements) should be absolutely fine. Check out the marking criteria and you'll spot that there are no marks for 'linear' experiments or for research questions. So they can hardly mark you down for what they don't state that they expect! You should talk about investigating a relationship in your Aim anyway. There's no other way to conduct an experiment! You'll always have a dependent and an independent variable. At least, I can't think of an occasion when you wouldn't. What exactly do you mean by more complex? If you investigated more than one relationship, that's cool to do as well, you just need extra hypotheses & more info. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
dragomir Posted April 1, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 1, 2009 Ok, I must agree that generally all IAs follow this standard write-ups and our IAs got all sections etc. so maybe i panic a little bit although these strange restrictions on the research questions still bug me. More complex - I mean we were free to choose any research question we liked (of course if it was appropriate to the subject etc.). So for example my first IA was about ohmic and non ohmic resistors and the research question was like "which resistor is an ohmic one - a light bulb of a piece of wire?" (it's no the point to consider if it was correct although it was accepted and i did this IA quite good). the investigation involved experiments with light bulb, as well as with the wire, there were some graphs, relations and all the things you said. But with the "new guidelines" given to us by our professor all IA seemed to be wrong and mine couldn't involve the investigation of more then one resistor so that i should investigate only one simple relation throughout whole IA. well, maybe i shouldn't worry but it's still interesting to know if there were any special criteria you followed doing your IAs (sorry if it's hard to understand this post but it's pretty late and i gotta go to sleep) Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sandwich Posted April 2, 2009 Report Share Posted April 2, 2009 Hrm. Wellllll I have to say, we've never done a "yes/no" "this/that" type experiment before! I guess the only problem with it would be that it's very hard to do a tight conclusion or give any decent backing information or analysis if you're not investigating a relationship in a focused manner. If you say that you did that, though... *shrug* I have no idea! xP All I can think is that it'd be hard to collect good raw data from that, as well as controlling variables tightly enough when the two things are so very different from each other. It's just ingrained in us that all experiments involve relationships between two things, I guess! If you say that the mark came out well, though, obviously you did. Ahhh I've no clue, being honest Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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