IB and IGCSE tutors for Al Garhoud families

Of all the recoverable marks in an IB or IGCSE paper, the largest single pool sits in command terms, and almost nobody teaches them explicitly. A command term is the verb at the start of a question, and it is not decoration. It specifies the assessment objective being tested, which determines what the markscheme will credit. A technically perfect answer to the wrong command term scores a fraction of the available marks.

The pattern is consistent across subjects and across boards. Students treat describe, explain, outline, discuss and evaluate as rough synonyms for write about this, and they are not. Describe asks for features without reasons. Explain requires a causal mechanism. Discuss requires more than one position. Evaluate requires a judgement supported by weighted evidence. Each of those is a different answer, and only one of them earns the marks on any given question.

This is the most self-serviceable thing on the page. A student who spends twenty minutes learning the command terms properly, and then goes back through a marked mock highlighting every question where they answered a different term from the one asked, will usually find several marks per paper. In a household where a parent travels and nobody is checking nightly, that is work a sixteen-year-old can genuinely do alone.

The table lists the terms that recur most and what each demands. The right-hand column gives the characteristic error, which is what to look for in a marked script. Confirm the exact definitions in the command-term glossary of your child's current subject guide, because the wording is set per subject group and the guides are revised.

Across the competitor pages fetched for this project, not one names a single Internal Assessment criterion. That is a striking gap, because the criteria are the specification. An Internal Assessment is not marked on general quality; it is marked against named criteria with fixed mark allocations, and a student who has not read them is guessing at a target that is published.

The sciences are the clearest case. The Diploma scientific investigation is assessed against four criteria, Research design, Data analysis, Conclusion and Evaluation, each carrying six marks for a total of 24, and the whole thing is worth 20 per cent of the subject grade at both Standard and Higher Level. That means a student who neglects Evaluation entirely has written off a quarter of the Internal Assessment marks and five per cent of the subject, regardless of how good the experiment was.

Mathematics works differently. The exploration is assessed against five criteria: Presentation worth four marks, Mathematical communication worth four, Personal engagement worth three, Reflection worth three and Use of mathematics worth six, giving twenty marks and 20 per cent of the grade. Use of mathematics is the heaviest single criterion, which is why an exploration with a modest mathematical core cannot reach the top band however nicely it is presented.

The table sets out the criteria for the Internal Assessments Al Garhoud families most often ask about. Read it alongside your child's draft and the teacher's comments. Check every allocation against the current subject guide for your child's cohort, since guides are revised on a rolling cycle and the version your teacher holds is the one that counts.

A Diploma subject grade is an arithmetic aggregate of components with published weights, which means a disappointing grade can always be decomposed. Most students never do that decomposition, and so revise the subject they feel worst about rather than the component carrying the most recoverable marks. Those are rarely the same thing.

The practical question is simple: for each subject, which single component carries the most weight, and how is the student currently performing in it? In the sciences, Paper 2 at 44 per cent is the heaviest component by a clear margin, and the Internal Assessment at 20 per cent is the one that can be improved before the examination rather than during it. In English at Standard Level the Individual Oral at 30 per cent is the largest single component and the most coachable.

The arithmetic matters because it changes the plan. If a student is sitting on a weak Internal Assessment mark in a science, no amount of paper practice recovers that 20 per cent, and the available improvement is capped before revision begins. Conversely, a student with a strong Internal Assessment has 80 per cent still in play and should be putting hours into Paper 2.

The table gives the weightings for the subjects Al Garhoud families most often ask about, at both levels. The right-hand column names the component that most often repays targeted work. Confirm all of these against the current subject guide for your child's cohort before planning around them, because the IB revises guides on a rolling cycle.

This is a reference table nobody in this market publishes, and it causes real damage by its absence. Assessed components carry limits, and exceeding them does not simply lose a mark or two. Depending on the component, material beyond the limit may not be read at all, which means a conclusion written past the word count is a conclusion that does not exist as far as the marks are concerned.

The limits also shape the work. A Theory of Knowledge essay at 1,600 words cannot sustain four knowledge questions, and a student who tries produces four shallow ones. An Economics commentary at 800 words cannot carry both a full theoretical exposition and an article analysis, which is why the marks sit in the link between them rather than in either alone. Understanding the limit is understanding the task.

Students consistently misjudge in one direction. They over-write the descriptive sections and arrive at the analytical ones with no words left, because the descriptive part is easier. The fix is a word budget allocated by criterion before writing starts: if Evaluation carries a quarter of the marks, it gets roughly a quarter of the words. That single habit changes outcomes more than most content teaching.

Confirm every limit against the current subject guide for your child's cohort before relying on it. These are the widely published figures for current guides, and the IB revises guides on a rolling cycle, so the version your child's teacher holds is the authoritative one.

IGCSE papers reward a narrower set of behaviours than students expect, and the losses are highly predictable across series. Four patterns account for most of them, and all four are technique rather than knowledge.

The first is unshown working. On a multi-mark Mathematics question, method marks are allocated to specific steps, and a correct final answer with no visible method scores a fraction of the total. This is the single most common avoidable loss in Cambridge 0580 and Pearson 4MA1, and it is entirely a habit problem. The second is command-term mismatch, already covered above, which bites hardest in the six-mark extended responses in Biology and Chemistry.

The third is the practical-skills component in the sciences. Candidates asked to suggest an improvement to a method describe the method; candidates asked to criticise a graph read values off it; candidates asked to identify a source of error name human error, which earns nothing. These questions appear in every series and the correct behaviours are a short list that can be taught in a couple of sessions.

The fourth is form and audience in English. A candidate who writes an article in letter form, or who ignores the specified audience in a directed writing task, is penalised under the form criterion however good the language is. All four of these are correctable from a marked script in a way that content gaps are not, which is why a mock paper is worth more than a term of general revision.

This is the skill worth transferring to a student in an Al Garhoud household, because it is the one that works when nobody is home to supervise. A marked mock script contains a complete diagnosis and most students look at the total and put it away.

The method is mechanical. First, go through the paper and mark every question where marks were lost, ignoring the ones that were correct. Second, for each loss, classify it into one of four categories: did not know the content, knew it but answered a different command term, knew it but showed no working, or ran out of time. Third, count the categories. The largest category is the problem, and it is usually not the first one.

That counting exercise is the whole diagnosis, and it is routinely surprising. A student convinced they are bad at Chemistry frequently discovers that two thirds of their lost marks were command-term mismatches and unshown working, which means they know considerably more Chemistry than their grade suggests and the fix is a fortnight of technique rather than a term of content.

Fourth and last, write the list down and bring it to the next session. A tutor given a classified list of losses can build a plan in ten minutes. A tutor given a grade has to spend the first paid hour producing the same list the student could have produced for free. Schools release scripts on request after mocks and internal assessments, and asking is entirely routine.

A rostered household cannot run on parental supervision, and pretending otherwise produces a term of missed homework followed by an unpleasant February. The realistic approach is to delegate deliberately: decide what the student owns, what the tutor owns and what the parent checks, and write it down once.

The student can own more than most parents assume by sixteen. Attending the session, submitting the work set, classifying their own losses on returned work, and keeping the deadline list are all within reach of a Year 11 or Year 12 student, and all of them build the self-management the Diploma demands anyway. What a student cannot reasonably own is noticing a slow drift across a term, because they have no baseline to compare against.

That drift detection is what the parent should keep, and it needs almost no time. A written record from each session, stating what was set, what came back and what was corrected, can be read in five minutes on a layover. Three such records in a row showing homework not submitted is a signal that does not require anyone to be in the room.

The tutor owns the content, the plan and the honesty of the reporting, including saying when hours should reduce or stop. A plan that only ever recommends continuing is not being reported honestly, and in a household where nobody is watching closely, that matters more than it does elsewhere.

One more thing belongs on the student's side of the line, and it is the one most worth building: the deadline list. Internal Assessment dates, Extended Essay drafts and mock windows are set by the school, published in September, and almost never written down by the person they apply to. A student who keeps that list themselves, on a wall or a phone, stops being dependent on a parent noticing a date from a newsletter read in an airport lounge.

This page has spent a lot of words on criteria and limits, so the boundary needs stating precisely. Knowing that the science Internal Assessment carries six marks for Evaluation does not entitle anyone to write the evaluation. The criteria are a specification for the student's work, not a brief for somebody else's.

A tutor may teach the content the investigation rests on, explain each criterion in the subject guide's own wording, read the student's own draft and put the criteria to them as questions, teach uncertainty propagation and data presentation, teach referencing, and help narrow a research question until it is answerable within the word limit. All of that is substantial and all of it leaves the authorship untouched.

A tutor may not produce any part of the submission, including a rewritten conclusion, a supplied evaluation paragraph or an edit heavy enough that the words cease to be the student's. There are providers in this market advertising completed Internal Assessments at a fixed price in dirhams. The IB's authenticity requirement places the consequence on the student, so a malpractice finding can cost the Diploma while the seller carries nothing.

The practical protection is a word budget and an early draft. A student who allocates words by criterion before writing, and who has a review session two weeks before the school deadline rather than two days, never arrives at the point where the shortcut looks attractive. Ask any prospective tutor what they will and will not do with a draft; a clear answer is the signal to look for.