How an English B Student Earned an A in ToK

Hannah came to me to prepare both halves of ToK — the exhibition first, then the Prescribed Title essay. Her school had set the tasks with examples but very little explanation of what those tasks actually required, and the feedback available to her there was too general to act on.

She was also an English B student. Expressing her own thinking freely in English was genuinely difficult for her, which in a subject assessed entirely through written argument is a real constraint.

My approach

The first thing to fix was the brief. Before anything else, we went through what each task actually asks for — what an exhibition object has to do, what a Prescribed Title essay is marked on — because an example without an explanation shows a student the finished product and none of the reasoning that produced it.

From there, Hannah chose first. She selected her prompt, and she selected the real-life examples for each paragraph, before I offered an opinion. I then suggested additional angles or alternative directions, and we discussed each of them properly until the prompt and the ideas were settled between us. The order matters: the essay stays hers, and my job is to test and extend her thinking rather than replace it.

Feedback then came in two distinct passes, and I kept them separate on purpose:

• The draft pass — structure and substance. Whether the writing followed the IB format, and whether what we had agreed in discussion had actually reached the page in a developed form. Nothing about wording at this stage.
• The final pass — sentences and vocabulary. Only once the argument was sound did we work through the essay line by line, polishing phrasing and word choice.

That order matters especially for a student writing in a second language. Polishing sentences inside an argument that is not yet working is wasted effort, and it tempts a student to protect a nicely written paragraph that ought to be cut.

The results

Hannah earned an A in ToK — in her school assessment and in her final IB grade — and came away with the maximum 3 additional points on her diploma. Those additional points are awarded on ToK and the Extended Essay together, so the A here was one half of a result she secured across both.

Why it worked

Hannah had clear ideas about the shape and direction of her essay, but she was not attached to them past the point of usefulness. She could hold a firm view and still take on a new idea when the discussion produced a better one — a balance that serves a student far better in ToK than either stubbornness or agreeing with everything.

We also spent a genuinely disproportionate amount of time simply developing ideas, and that was deliberate. If a student has something she wants to say, weak English is a fixable problem: marking and redrafting will lift the quality of the writing. If the substance is not convincing, no amount of good phrasing or vocabulary will lift the essay above a C. Ideas first is not a stylistic preference — it is the order in which the two problems are actually solvable.

The last reason is the least glamorous. Because the feedback covered both the detail of every sentence and the flow of the whole argument, the essay went through a great many rounds of revision before the final version. There was no shortcut available, and she did not go looking for one. Persistence mattered more here than talent did.

Closing thoughts

ToK is often assumed to reward students who write elegantly in English. Hannah’s case suggests otherwise. She was an English B student, and she finished with an A because her thinking was worth reading and she was willing to redraft until the writing did it justice.

Those 3 additional points on her diploma began, months earlier, with sitting down and working out what the task was actually asking for.