Write it up
Seven sections written at different times over several months, in slightly different voices, none of which have ever been read one after another. And a dataset you downloaded a while ago, whose version you had better have written down at the time.
- One report that reads as though one person wrote it in one go, under the limit, fully referenced, and ready to hand over.
No new marks are available here. Several are still available to lose.
Going over the limit, burying evidence in an appendix nobody reads, or referencing so loosely that a source cannot be traced. All three are avoidable in an afternoon, and all three cost more than they should.
You have been carrying a figure on every page since step 1. Here they are together. Four follow published guidance for this format and three are ours; the IB sets none of them.
| Section | Crit | Marks | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Research question | A | 50 | |
| Environmental issue and background | A | 4 | 500 |
| Strategy, perspectives and tensions | B | 4 | 500 |
| Method | C | 4 | 500 |
| Treatment of data, prose only | D | 6 | 200 |
| Analysis and conclusion | E | 6 | 550 |
| Evaluation | F | 6 | 600 |
| Total | 30 | 2,900 |
Note Criterion D (Treatment of data): six marks for 200 words, because the tables and graphs that earn them are not counted at all.
Four things belong at the top of the first page: the title, your personal code, the codes of anyone you collaborated with on methodology, and the word count. There is no requirement for a cover page or a contents page.
The IB publishes no template. Lay the report out in the order of the criteria, A to F, with a clear subheading on each section: a marker working down the descriptors never has to hunt, and headings are free.
Those six are the whole of what the IB leaves out of the 3,000; everything else you type counts, including the numbered steps of a method. Keep figure captions to a line or two rather than hiding analysis in them.
Everything below is how we suggest you actually do it.
You get one draft read, and it will say "develop this"
Your teacher may comment on one full draft: general remarks on strengths and weaknesses, annotations, advice. What they may not do is correct it. The improving is yours.
This is the whole reason to aim at 2,900 rather than 3,000. Feedback on an ESS investigation almost always asks for something to be developed rather than trimmed, and at the ceiling the only way to act on it is to delete something good. A hundred words in hand is the difference between improving the report and rearranging it.
Hand over something complete rather than something polished. A finished-but-rough evaluation gets you useful feedback; a beautiful background and three missing sections gets you comments on the background. You only get one go at this, so spend it on the parts you are least sure about.
The IB publishes exemplar investigations with their marks and the examiner's commentary in the teacher support material. Ask your teacher for two: one strong, one weak. Mark them yourself against the descriptors, then read what the examiner said.
An hour of that teaches you more about what "explains" means than any amount of reading about it. Do it before your own draft, while you can still act on what you notice.
Four things the current criteria no longer ask for
Templates outlive syllabuses. If you inherited a structure from an older student, a website or a textbook printed before 2026, check it against this before you fill it in.
Criterion B (Strategy) is about a real-world strategy, a different thing sharing a word, and it does not assess your sampling. How your samples were placed still belongs in the method, in a sentence, because a method nobody could repeat fails Criterion C (Method). What has gone is the separate justified section.
No marks ride on a risk assessment. Say what was actually risky about this work, in two or three sentences that could only have been written about your investigation. Consent, where people were involved, is the part that still earns its place outright.
Limitations, improvements, unresolved questions. Strengths were part of the old criteria and are not part of these. Every sentence praising your own design is a sentence taken from a strand that is marked.
The old course ended by recommending action. This one does not, and a section called Application overlaps Criterion B (Strategy) only partly, which is worse than not writing it. The place for that instinct is the return to the strategy at the end of Criterion E (Analysis and conclusion).
Between them these four can take five hundred words out of a report that needed them elsewhere, and none can earn a mark. Write to the criteria you are marked against, not to the shape of a report you have seen.
Using AI, and saying so
The IB does not ban AI tools, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. What it asks is narrow, and worth knowing exactly rather than by rumour: the work has to be yours, and anything you take from a tool is cited like any other source.
The test being applied is whether you used AI to help you learn, or to appear to have done something you did not do. A tool can explain a statistical test, suggest search terms, or argue with a plan you have already written. It cannot choose your question, decide what your data means, or write your evaluation: those are the things being marked, and handing them over is handing over the marks.
Authenticity. The work is your own. A tool is not an author, and it cannot be listed as one.
Transparency. If you copy, paraphrase or modify anything a tool produced, name the tool in the body at the point you used it and add it to your bibliography. Where school policy and the IB's differ, follow the stricter.
The declaration. The submission carries a declaration of AI use. It does not replace naming the tool in the body, and naming it does not replace the declaration. Do both, and be exact: "used to explain what a Mann-Whitney U test does" is a better answer than a tick.
Ask a chatbot for sources and it will sometimes invent them, complete with plausible authors, journal titles and page numbers. Criterion A (Research question and inquiry) wants citations detailed enough to be traceable, so a fabricated reference is a lost mark and an academic integrity finding at the same time.
The rule that prevents it: every source in your bibliography is one you have actually opened. If you cannot find it by searching its title, it may not exist.
Before you sign it off
You will confirm this is your own work, and authenticity can be checked against your proposal, your draft, your references and your usual writing. Where you worked with others on methodology, the writing must still be entirely yours. And the same piece of work cannot be submitted for both this and your extended essay.
Your work is moderated by somebody outside your school, and candidate and school identity must not appear anywhere in the report. The obvious half is names: yours, your teacher's, the school's, a classmate's. Your personal code is the only identifier the document carries.
The half people miss is images. A face, a name on a bag, a logo on a fleece, a minibus, a sports hall, a signed consent form photographed for the appendix, a screenshot with your account name in the corner of the spreadsheet. Crop it, blur it, retake it, or leave it out. Anything you did not take yourself is cited like any other source, and anything you did take is credited as the author's own photograph, which credits you without naming you.
Eight steps, one environmental issue, and a report that argues something about a real place.
The part worth keeping, long after the marks come back, is the bit in the middle: that a decision about a hillside somewhere involves people who want incompatible things, and that measuring the ground carefully can inform that argument without settling it. That is the whole subject, in 2,900 words.
Referencing a dataset
The IB does not prescribe a style; your school does. At the International School of Geneva - Campus des Nations it is Chicago footnotes, used across every IA and the extended essay, so you learn one system and reuse it everywhere.
Whatever style you use, the requirement is traceability. On this route that word does more work than usual, because your evidence is a file that can be revised, moved or replaced. A reference that gets somebody to the publisher is not enough; it has to get them to the version you used.
If the download offers a DOI, use it instead of the URL. It is a permanent address for one specific version, and it survives the publisher reorganising their website, which a URL does not.
Note the second card. The data and the document explaining how the data was made are two sources, and citing both is what shows a reader you went and read the methodology rather than only pressing download.
The last read-through
Read the whole thing once, in order, out loud if you can bear it. Seven sections written over several months do not automatically agree with each other, and the disagreements are invisible while you are inside any one of them.
On this route there is one specific thing to hunt for: a claim that is bigger than your rows. It creeps in through ordinary words. A study of thirty monitoring stations becomes a study of a river; a study of a river becomes a study of a lake; a study of one indicator becomes a study of water quality.
An early draft of the Geneva study called itself an investigation of Lake Geneva. Every monitoring station in it was on a tributary, and the one station actually on the lake had been dropped because it read zero for nearly thirty years.
The word had reached the title, the research question and the conclusion before anybody noticed, and each place it appeared was a claim the data could not support. Nobody had lied. One noun had been doing work it was never entitled to do.
Search your finished report for the name of the biggest place you mention, then check every hit against the rows you actually analysed. If your data is thirty stations on six streams, that is what your title, your question and your conclusion are allowed to say.
It can respond to prose you have already written: where a paragraph is unclear, where you have said the same thing twice, whether a sentence means what you intended.
It cannot write or rewrite it for you. And whatever you did use it for gets named at the point you used it and listed in your bibliography, which is what the section above is about.
Ready to submit
Secondary data checklist0 of 15The last checklist in the process. Once you submit the final version it cannot be retracted, so it is worth going through slowly. The four about identity, the AI declaration, legacy sections and the order of your headings came out of the first session's report.
The Geneva rivers investigation used on the secondary-data route of this guide is the author’s own analysis of a published cantonal dataset. Every figure quoted comes from the Canton of Geneva’s open data, downloaded on 10 September 2026; the duplication, the missing year and the varying campaign counts described in the guide are as found on that date and may since have been corrected. The selection rules, the analysis and the conclusions are the author’s and not the canton’s.