IB MYP Personal Project Help in Dubai

Three criteria, each marked from zero to eight, for a total of twenty-four. Criterion A is planning: the student states a learning goal and a product, defines success criteria for the product, and plans the work. Criterion B is applying skills: the student shows how the Approaches to Learning skills they selected were used to achieve the goal and the product. Criterion C is reflecting: the student evaluates the quality of the product against their own success criteria and reflects on what they learned about the global context and about themselves as a learner.

Read that list again and notice what is absent. There is no criterion for how impressive the product is, how much money the fundraiser raised, how many views the video got, or how long the student worked. Those things can be evidence inside a criterion, but they are never the mark. A student who built a working robot and cannot say which research skill produced which decision will score below a student who knitted a scarf and documented every iteration against stated criteria.

The twenty-four marks are then converted by the school to a grade from one to seven using the published MYP boundaries, and schools entering students for MYP certification submit a sample for external moderation by the IB. That matters because a school's internal mark can move. It also matters because the criteria are not a local invention; they are the same descriptors a moderator anywhere will read, which is why rewriting success criteria in the language the descriptors use is worth real marks.

The table below sets out the three criteria with the strands inside them and the loss that is most common in each. Work through it with your child in front of the actual draft rather than in the abstract, because every one of these failures looks fine until it is checked against the descriptor.

The single largest loss is a learning goal that cannot be assessed. I want to learn about climate change is not a goal; it is a topic. I want to learn how to measure and reduce the electricity a single Dubai apartment uses in a month, and produce a guide other residents can follow, is a goal, because it tells you what success would look like and therefore what the success criteria must be. Rewriting the goal is a thirty-minute job that often moves criterion A by two bands, and it is the first thing a session does.

The second loss is success criteria that describe intentions rather than standards. My website will look professional cannot be evaluated by anyone. My website will load in under three seconds on a phone, will be readable at arm's length without zooming, and will be understood by three test users aged over sixty can be evaluated, and the evaluation writes itself in criterion C. Students resist specific criteria because specific criteria can fail, which is exactly why they earn marks.

The third loss is in criterion B, and it is a documentation failure rather than a skills failure. Students use research, organisation and self-management skills constantly and record none of it. A screenshot of a search that returned nothing useful, dated, with one line about what the student changed next, is stronger evidence than a paragraph in the report claiming that research skills were developed. Evidence has to exist at the time; it cannot be remembered into existence in April.

The fourth loss is the reflection. Criterion C asks for evaluation against the stated criteria and reflection on the global context, and most drafts give a narrative of events plus a sentence about enjoying the project. The fix is mechanical: take each success criterion in turn, state whether it was met, give the evidence, and say what you would change. Then separately address what the global context revealed. Done that way, the section is shorter and scores higher.

Students treat the process journal as an administrative burden the school has invented, and schools rarely have time to correct that impression. The journal is where criteria A and B are actually proved. Nothing in the report can be awarded on assertion: a claim that the student planned carefully is worth nothing without an extract showing a plan being made and revised. The report selects from the journal, so a thin journal caps the report regardless of how well it is written.

A journal does not need to be long or beautiful. It needs to be dated, varied in form, and honest about what did not work. Photographs of a prototype at three stages, a screenshot of a rejected design with two lines about why, a voice note transcribed, a printed email asking a professional a question, a crossed-out plan with the revision beside it. Five minutes after each working session is enough, and the five minutes have to happen on the day rather than at the end.

Where a journal is already thin and the deadline is close, there is an honest route and a dishonest one. The dishonest route is to write undated entries pretending to be old, which moderators recognise immediately and which the academic honesty form makes a declaration problem. The honest route is to document the remaining weeks properly, and in the report to be explicit that the early stages were under-documented and to say what the student would do differently. Criterion C rewards exactly that kind of honest self-assessment.

In sessions, the journal is the first thing opened and the last thing checked. A tutor reads it with the criteria beside it and says which entries carry weight, which are decorative, and what kind of entry is missing. The student then creates the entries from their own work, in their own words, because an entry written by anyone else is not evidence of the student's skills.

The report is a separate assessed artefact from the product, and it may be submitted in several formats. The limits differ by format and they are not advisory. A written report runs from fifteen hundred to thirty-five hundred words. An electronic format such as a website or blog carries the same word range. An oral format such as a podcast or recorded presentation runs thirteen to fifteen minutes. A visual format such as a slide sequence has its own stated limit, and your school will confirm which formats it accepts.

Choosing the format badly costs marks for reasons that have nothing to do with ability. A student who speaks fluently and writes slowly often does better with a recorded report, provided they script the criterion coverage rather than improvising; an unscripted fifteen minutes usually spends twelve of them on narrative. A student who writes well can be undone by the upper word limit, because the evaluation ends up compressed into the final two hundred words after three thousand words of description.

The practical discipline is to allocate the limit to the criteria before writing anything. A rough split of a third to planning, a third to skills evidence, and a third to reflection keeps criterion C from being squeezed, which is the most common structural fault in a long report. Appendices and journal extracts generally sit outside the main count, but the rules on that are set by your school's reading of the current guide, so ask rather than assume.

The table below sets out the formats with their limits and the mistake each one invites. It is worth reading before the student picks, not after they have written two thousand words in the wrong register.

Every Personal Project is framed by one of the six MYP global contexts, and most students pick one at the end to satisfy a box on the form. Chosen properly, the global context does real work: it gives criterion C something to reflect on beyond the student's own performance, and it keeps the inquiry from drifting into a hobby. Chosen badly, it produces a paragraph of invented significance that a reader can see through immediately.

The six are identities and relationships; orientation in space and time; personal and cultural expression; scientific and technical innovation; globalisation and sustainability; and fairness and development. The test for a good match is simple. If you can state, in one sentence, what question the context makes you ask that you would not otherwise have asked, the match is real. If the context only describes the topic, it is decoration.

Dubai gives students unusually good material here, and it is the material competitors never use. Water and energy consumption in a desert city, construction labour and migration, the preservation of pearl-diving and Bedouin heritage inside a city rebuilt in forty years, Arabic and English coexisting in one household, extreme summer heat and who it falls hardest on, a population drawn from more than a hundred nationalities in a few square kilometres. Any of those gives a context genuine traction.

The table pairs each context with a project goal that works in this city and explains why it is assessable. Use it as a prompt rather than a menu: a goal a student has not chosen for themselves tends to produce a journal nobody wants to keep.

The Personal Project has no external exam date, which is precisely why it slips. The only fixed point is the date your school has set for submission, and in Dubai that usually sits in the second term, months before the end of the academic year. Everything else is a school-internal milestone: a goal approval, a supervisor meeting, a first draft, a journal check. If your child cannot tell you those dates, that is the first task rather than a tutoring question.

Once the date is known, the plan runs backwards. The report needs two to three weeks of drafting with the journal already complete. The product needs to be finished before the report begins, not alongside it, because evaluation of an unfinished product is guesswork. The journal needs to span the whole project, so the start date is dictated by how much documented process the criteria expect rather than by how long the product takes to make.

Two Dubai-specific collisions are worth planning around. The second term contains mock examinations for students also sitting IGCSE or starting Diploma courses, and in some years Ramadan falls across part of it, shifting family routines and school hours. Neither is a reason to delay; both are reasons to put the journal-heavy weeks before them and the drafting weeks after, which is a conversation to have in the first term rather than the week before submission.

The table gives a backwards schedule from a single submission date. Adjust the spacing to your school's own milestones; the order is the part that matters.

Every Personal Project student has a supervisor at school. That person approves the goal, holds the official meetings, signs the academic honesty form and submits the mark. A tutor does not replace them and should never try to. The most useful thing a tutor can do early is make sure the student goes to their supervisor meetings with questions written down, because a supervisor with thirty projects to run gives the best attention to the student who arrives prepared.

Inside that structure a tutor can do a great deal. A tutor can interrogate a learning goal until it is measurable. A tutor can explain, in plain English, what a criterion descriptor means and show what the difference between two bands looks like using an example from another topic. A tutor can read a journal and say which entries would count as evidence. A tutor can read a draft and leave comments naming the criterion, the band and what the band above requires.

A tutor cannot write, rewrite or complete any part of the project or the report, and cannot produce the product. That is not a cautious house rule; it is what the academic honesty declaration says, and the consequence of breaching it falls on the student. One site competing for these searches advertises completed coursework for a fee. A family paying for that is buying a malpractice finding, and the student loses the qualification rather than the money.

Being explicit about this helps the student rather than restricting them. When a tutor says, I will not write this sentence, but I will tell you that the evaluation of your second success criterion is missing and here is what a moderator would look for, the student learns something that transfers to the Extended Essay two years later. That is the actual product of good supervision, and it is also why written comments in the student's own document are better evidence of honest support than an undocumented conversation.

Published rates for one-to-one tutoring in Dubai give the shape of the market. Budget online sessions are advertised from around AED 45 to 65 an hour by EdFlik and from roughly AED 33 to 52 by Tutopiya. A qualified subject tutor working online sits around AED 150 to 300, with Unitors publishing IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. Specialist IB work is quoted at AED 200 to 450 and above in Bestimate's 2026 Dubai rate table, with TutorChase at AED 270 and a premium named tier reaching AED 650 at BartyED. Those are the providers' own published figures, not IB Gram's.

Project supervision prices differently from subject tutoring, and it is worth understanding why before comparing hourly numbers. Most of the value sits in reading time outside the session: a journal audit and a draft read with criteria beside them take longer than the session that follows. A rate that covers only live minutes will either exclude that reading or absorb it invisibly, and the difference shows up as comments you can or cannot point at afterwards.

Volume also differs. A full fortnightly supervision across a project is perhaps eight to ten contact hours spread over a term, which is far less than a subject plan running weekly for the same period. A criterion clinic is three sessions. Families often assume project help is the expensive option because the project feels large, when in practice the hours are fewer and more concentrated than exam-subject tutoring.

IB Gram quotes its own rate after the free trial lesson, stating the session length and whether document reading and written comments are included. No price on this page is ours, every figure is attributed to whoever published it, and no claim is made here about outcomes, because a Personal Project mark depends on a student's own documented work and nobody can honestly promise a band.