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WAB Faculty & Staff

EE: From Draft to Final Submission

Extended Essay Resources

Improving your EE

What Your Supervisor CAN Do:

  • Ask open-ended questions that prompt you to think, such as:
    • "I'm not sure I follow your argument here, because..."
    • "What did you mean here: could you express this point more clearly?"
    • "Are you sure all your findings and data are accurate?"
    • "Are there some adjustments you might make to improve this section?"
  • Add comments that indicate how your essay could be improved (without editing the text)

What Your Supervisor CANNOT Do:

  • Correct spelling and punctuation
  • Correct experimental work or mathematics
  • Rewrite any part of the essay
  • Indicate where whole sections should be moved
  • Proofread the essay for errors
  • Correct bibliographies or citations

The Process:

  1. You submit your complete draft before a supervision meeting
  2. Your supervisor reads it and adds written comments
  3. You meet one-on-one to discuss those comments together
  4. The draft must not be heavily annotated or edited

Why This Matters:

The balance is important: too little support might limit your potential, but too much support compromises your independence and academic integrity.

EE Support Materials pg 20 & ASK EE

Prompt to try in FLINT for EE draft feedback

*Remember to pay attention to AI ACCURACY.  It tends to be overly generous and inflate marks. It may also bring in guidance from an outdated version of the EE Guide.  When in doubt, Trust Your Supervisor!

PROMPT

Evaluate my Extended Essay draft in [subject] using the IB Extended Essay rubric for May 2027 submissions. Provide separate, criterion-aligned feedback for:

  • Criterion A: Framework for the Essay (6 pts)
  • Criterion B: Knowledge and Understanding (6 pts)
  • Criterion C: Analysis & Line of Argument (6 pts)
  • Criterion D: Discussion & Evaluation (8 pts)

For each criterion:

  • Give a provisional level/mark with a brief justification mapped to the rubric language.
  • Identify 3–5 specific strengths, citing concrete examples from the draft (quote or reference page/section).
  • Identify 3–5 improvement opportunities with actionable guidance (what to change, why it matters, and how to approach it), but do not rewrite or correct text for me.
  • Pose 2–3 targeted questions that would prompt me to improve my reasoning, evidence use, structure, or methodological rigor.

General requirements:

  • Evaluate as a strict, impartial university professor who does not know me.
  • Do not fix errors or provide rewritten passages; focus on diagnosis, rationale, and strategies.
  • Flag any risks of academic integrity, insufficient engagement with sources, weak methodology, or noncompliance with EE formal requirements (title page, word count, citations, figures, appendices).
  • Note any misalignment between the research question, methods, analysis, and conclusion.
  • If my draft lacks information needed for a fair judgment, state the assumptions you’re making and specify what evidence would change your assessment.

Deliverables:

  • A brief executive summary (5–7 bullets) of overall strengths and priorities for improvement.
  • Criterion-by-criterion feedback as specified above.
  • A short checklist I can use to revise before submission.

I will attach the draft and indicate the subject discipline and research question. If the rubric you have differs, ask for the exact rubric version.

In your final extended essay that you are ready to submit, please check the following.

  • Is it clear that you have responded to your research question with thorough analysis, discussion and evaluation?
  • Are you satisfied that your line of argument is clear to the reader?
  • Are you satisfied that your extended essay aligns with the principles and practices of academic integrity?
  • Have you chosen a font suitable for on-screen reading?
  • Do the font size and line spacing facilitate on-screen reading?
  • Does your title page include the following?
    • Your candidate code
    • Your research question
    • The DP subject(s)
    • The interdisciplinary framework (if applicable)
    • The word count
  • Have you prepared an accurate table of contents, with page numbers that match the page numbers in the text of your essay?
  • Are all diagrams, tables and images appropriately numbered and labelled?
  • Does the essay have no more than 4,000 words?
  • Have you proofread the text for spelling and grammar errors?
  • Have you checked that any material presented in the appendices is relevant and necessary?
  • Is your RPF complete and ready for submission? Is it no more than 500 words long and written in the same language as the essay?

Documentation Checklist- Are your citations correct?  This will impact your Academic Integrity.

  •  When an author’s exact words are used, have quotation marks been placed around the quotation and has the author of the original work been named (cited)?
  •  If a quotation is indented, quotation marks may not be required, but the author must still be cited; have indented quotations been cited?
  •  When someone else’s thoughts and ideas have been written, have they still been named (cited)?
  •  When using someone else’s words or work, is it clear where such use starts—and where it finishes?
  •  Are full references included for all borrowed images, tables, graphs, maps, and so on?
  •  Print material: Have page numbers of print material used been included (especially important with exact quotations)?
  •  Internet material: Are both the date on which the material was posted and the date of the last visit to the webpage or site included?
  •  Internet material: Is the URL or the digital object identifier (DOI) included?
  •  For each citation in the text, is there a full reference in the list of references (or works cited/bibliography) at the end?
  •  Is the citation a direct link to the first word(s) of the reference?
  •  For each reference in the list of references (or works cited/bibliography) at the end, is there a citation in the text?
  •  Do(es) the first word(s) of the reference link directly to the citation as used?
  •  Is the list of references (or works cited/bibliography) in alphabetical order, with the last name of the author first?

EE Support Materials pg 50

Format for the EE

Your extended essay should be clearly written in a formal academic style, appropriate to the subject(s) from which the topic is drawn. Given that the extended essay is a formally written research paper, it should strive to maintain a professional, academic look.

To help achieve this, follow this formatting guidance.

  • Font size 12 and 1.5 line spacing—this helps the examiner with on-screen marking.
  • Page numbering (mandatory), beginning with the first page following your contents page.
  • Anonymity—there is no student, supervisor or school name anywhere in the file submitted.
  • A file size smaller than 10 MB. Consider the size of embedded images, which may add considerably to the file size, and optimize them if needed. Note that the reflection and progress form (RPF) is uploaded separately and is not part of the overall file size of the essay.

Submitting your extended essay in the required format will help set the tone of the essay and will aid readability for on-screen assessment by examiners.

Overall structure

The structure of your essay is very important because it helps you to organize your line of argument.

The following structural conventions must be present in the essay you submit for assessment.

  • Title page
  • Contents page
  • Introduction
  • Body of the essay
  • Conclusion
  • Reference list or bibliography

In addition to the recognized structure of any extended essay, as above, it is also important to incorporate any structural conventions that relate to the subject(s) you are using.

Word counts

The upper limit for all extended essays is 4,000 words. Note that examiners are instructed not to read or assess any material in excess of the word limit.

This means that essays containing more than 4,000 words will be negatively compromised across all assessment criteria. You should therefore ensure that your essay remains within the word limit. If the word count of your final draft is over 4,000 words you should edit it down accordingly.

The table below provides specific guidance on the content that is and is not included in the word count.

Included in Word Count NOT Included in Word Count
The Introduction Table of Contents
The Body  Headers (next to pg #)
The Conclusion Maps, Charts, Diagrams, Annotated Illustrations
Quotations Tables
Footnotes (that are not citations) Equations, Formulas & Calculations
Section headings in the text Citations: paranthetical, numbered, or footnotes
  The Bibliography
  The Reflection

Students writing in Chinese, Japanese or Korean

Students writing their extended essay in Chinese, Japanese or Korean should use the following conversions.

  • Chinese: 1 word = approximately 1.2 Chinese characters (upper limit 4,800 characters)
  • Japanese: 1 word = approximately 2 Japanese characters (upper limit 8,000 characters)
  • Korean: 1 word = 1 word

When typing in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, word processing software is likely to include the number of characters and punctuation in the word count. Students should not include punctuation in the word count for assessed work. The word count should only reflect the number of characters typed.

EE Guide pg 87-92

EE Q & A chatbot

Tips for Word Count

Word count

Extended essays should be 4,000 words long or fewer. The examiner will stop reading an essay once the 4,000-word mark is reached. Anything after the word limit will not be read and will not count towards your mark. If your essay is longer than 4,000 words, the examiner might not even reach your conclusion or could miss some of your argument.

The following are some key points to consider in managing your word count.

  1. Your document’s software application probably has a feature that will give you a total word count. Keep an eye on this regularly
  2. Note that some elements of your essay do not contribute to the word count. Check the “Writing your extended essay” section of the Extended essay guide for a list of these elements. Count the words you have used that are excluded from the word count, and then deduct this number from the total given by the software. This revised number needs to be reported on your essay's title page: it should be 4,000 words or fewer.
  3. While there is an upper limit on the number of words you can use, there is no lower limit. Be aware, however, that you may be inadvertently penalizing yourself by making your essay too short, failing to get the highest marks available. If your essay is too short, you might not have said everything that might be said in answering your research question. Or, you might have chosen too narrow a topic and you may need to revisit both the topic and the research question.
  4. It is worth noting that extended essays in mathematics tend to fall short of 4,000 words. This is because mathematics essays often make use of many equations and formulas, and these are not included in the word count. In most other subjects, it will be more likely that you could make full use of the 4,000-word limit.
  5. Sometimes raising the word count can be more difficult than reducing the word count. This might indicate that you need to widen your topic and research question—or even rethink your essay entirely because currently it is not comprehensive or thorough enough.
  6. Once you have completed the draft of your essay, again check the number of words you have used and edit the essay as necessary. Do this before submitting it to your supervisor for feedback, and again before the final submission of your work for upload.

Reducing Word Count:

  • Do all the points you make address the research question? If they add nothing to your investigation, these should probably be the first content to cut.
  • Can you shorten some of the evidence you use to support the points you make? Can you omit some words from your quotations and still support the point? (If so, show that you have omitted words by using an ellipsis (...)—three dots to replace the words omitted.)
  • Instead of shortening long quotations, can you summarize them by paraphrasing?
  • Does some of the evidence you have used echo something said earlier? Perhaps replace it, e.g. “Park (2020) came to similar conclusions” or “Lee (2019) and Park (2020) both suggest that ...”. This may work especially well in your review of the literature.
  • Are your explanations of evidence you have used too long? Can you shorten these?
  • Will your conclusions still be valid if you omit some points altogether? Perhaps leave out some of the less important points you have made.
  • Strategies such as shortening sentences (omit conjunctions), omitting adjectives and adverbs, and using active rather than passive voice can be useful, but tend not to reduce the word count by large amounts.
  • It may be that your topic is too wide and your research question too broad, and you need a major rethink.

Raising Word Count

  • Have you offered sufficient evidence to support the points you are making? Can you find more (and possibly better) quotations to support your points?
  • Have you explained how each of your points address the research question?
  • Can you add further relevant material to your review of the literature?
  • Is there more counterevidence you might use, other people’s findings and opinions? Can you rebut the counterevidence, and show why you believe it is not valid? It may be that your topic is too narrow and your research question too fine, in which case you may need a major rethink.

EE Supporting Materials pf 39-41