IB MYP Tutor in Sharjah

A percentage implies a total of marks available across a term. The Middle Years Programme does not work that way. Each subject group has four criteria, each criterion has published descriptors in bands, and a teacher judges which band the work sits in and awards a level from 0 to 8 for that criterion on that task. Those judgements are not averaged into a mark out of a hundred because the criteria measure different things, and a single number would hide exactly the information the system exists to surface.

The confusion this causes is predictable and almost universal. Parents arriving from a CBSE, British or American system read 5 out of 8 as 62 per cent and conclude their child is struggling. In fact a 5 sits in the middle band of the descriptor, describing substantial achievement, and a student with four 5s converts to a solid grade. Meanwhile a student with a 7 on criterion A and a 3 on criterion B, totalling the same number, has a specific and fixable problem that the percentage reading would have buried.

So the first useful thing a session does is simply read the report properly with you. Which criteria were assessed this term, on which tasks, and at what level. Which criterion appears twice at a low level across two different subjects, because that is usually a skill problem rather than a subject problem. And which criterion has not been assessed yet this year, because an absent level is not a zero and is frequently misread as one.

The criteria are named, published and stable, which makes them the most useful diagnostic tool in the programme. Across most subject groups criterion A rewards knowing and understanding, and it is the criterion students tend to score best on, because it is closest to what they are used to being tested on. Criterion B is where the programme asks for something school has often not taught explicitly: investigating a pattern in Mathematics, designing a fair test in Sciences, framing a researchable question in Individuals and Societies.

Criterion C and criterion D then separate the upper bands. Communicating, in Mathematics and in Individuals and Societies, is a presentation and notation criterion, and students lose marks for workings that are correct and unreadable. Criterion D is the reflective one: applying mathematics in a real-life context, reflecting on the impacts of science, thinking critically about a source. These are the criteria where an able student plateaus for two years without anybody naming the reason.

The table below sets out the four criteria for the subject groups Sharjah families ask about most. Take it to a parents' evening. The useful question is not how your child is getting on in science, it is which criterion the last Sciences task assessed and what the descriptor for the next band up actually requires. Teachers answer that question readily, because it is the language they mark in, and it converts an eight-minute appointment from a general reassurance into a specific instruction you can act on for the rest of the term. Write the answer down, including the criterion letter, because the letter is what makes the next report readable.

At reporting time the four criterion levels for a subject group are added, giving a total out of 32, and that total is converted to a grade from 1 to 7 using a published boundary table. This is the step almost no school explains in writing, and it is the step that makes a report intelligible. It also explains something that looks unfair at first: a single criterion moving from 4 to 5 can move a subject grade, while another criterion moving from 6 to 7 may not, depending on where the total sits relative to a boundary.

That arithmetic has a practical consequence for how a term is spent. If a student sits two marks below a boundary, the fastest route is the lowest criterion, not the favourite one. A student on levels of 7, 3, 6 and 5 totals 21. Lifting criterion B from 3 to 5 moves the total to 23 and the grade with it, and that is a narrower piece of teaching than a general push on the subject. Reading the boundary table backwards is how a six-week plan gets written.

The boundaries below are the general ones published in the programme documentation for converting a criterion total to a final grade. Schools apply them with their own reporting conventions, and the IB reviews its documentation periodically, so confirm the current table with your child's MYP coordinator before you plan around a specific boundary. The structure of the argument does not change even if a boundary moves by a mark.

In Mathematics, criterion B asks a student to investigate a pattern: to apply a problem-solving technique, recognise a pattern, describe it as a general rule, verify the rule, and justify or prove it. Students reliably reach the third step and stop. They see that the sequence goes up by three, write a rule in words, and never produce the general term, never test it against a case they have not used, and never explain why it must hold. Each of those omissions costs a band, and none of them is about arithmetic ability.

In Sciences, criterion B is inquiring and designing: a focused research question, a testable hypothesis with scientific reasoning behind it, named independent, dependent and controlled variables, and a method detailed enough to be repeated. The common loss is a hypothesis stated as a prediction with no reasoning, and a method that lists equipment instead of describing control. Criterion C then compounds it, because a conclusion that restates the graph rather than evaluating it against the hypothesis cannot reach the top band.

Both of these are teachable in a handful of sessions, which is why they are worth naming precisely. The work is not more content. It is a sequence: pattern, general term, test, justification; or question, hypothesis, variables, method, control. A student who has written that sequence out six times on six different tasks stops losing the marks. This is the single most common reason an MYP grade moves within one term, and it is almost never what a parent is told to work on.

Progress in a criterion-based programme is readable without being in the room, provided you collect four things. The task sheet, which states the criteria being assessed and the global context. The task-specific clarification, which is the teacher's version of the descriptors rewritten for that particular task and is the document parents most often do not know exists. The student's submitted response. And the awarded levels with the teacher's comment. Ask the school for all four; they are routinely available and rarely volunteered together.

Across a block of sessions those four documents become a record. Week two, criterion B at 3 with the general term missing. Week five, criterion B at 4 with a general term and no verification. Week nine, criterion B at 6 with a tested rule and a partial justification. That sequence is auditable in a way that a comment about growing confidence is not, and it also exposes the opposite case honestly: if three marked tasks show the same band and the same missing step, the approach is wrong and more sessions will not repair it.

What should not be offered as evidence is a satisfaction figure or a percentage improvement with no method behind it. Those numbers are common in this market and unverifiable by design; the research behind these pages found competitor pages publishing two different review averages on the same page. A criterion level awarded by your child's own teacher on your child's own task cannot be manufactured the same way, which is precisely why it is the thing to build a review around.

The Personal Project in MYP 5 is assessed on process, not on the artefact. The marks sit in planning a goal with testable success criteria, applying skills to produce the outcome, and reflecting on the whole thing against those criteria. A student who builds something impressive with a thin process journal scores below a student whose outcome is modest and whose journal documents decisions, dead ends and revisions. Families discover this late and it is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the final MYP year.

The supervisor at school owns the process, and a tutor works alongside it rather than around it. What is permitted is teaching the skills the project needs, questioning a goal that is too broad to evaluate, pointing at a success criterion that cannot be tested, and showing what a reflective entry looks like. What is not permitted is producing any part of the outcome, supplying text, or restructuring the journal. The journal must record the student's own decisions, and a journal that reads as though an adult organised it is a problem rather than an advantage.

This is worth stating bluntly because the surrounding market does not. The competitor research behind these pages found a site selling completed internal assessments for a fixed fee. A student who submits work that is not their own faces an academic-honesty investigation, and the consequence falls on the student. No IB Gram tutor supplies assessed work, and none distributes IB subject guides, past papers or mark schemes as downloads; those belong to the IB and should be read from its own site or from the school's coordinator.

The Diploma Programme feels like a different qualification and is in some ways a continuation. Criterion-based marking has already trained the habit of answering a published descriptor rather than guessing what a teacher wants, and that habit transfers directly to internal assessment criteria at Diploma level. What changes is that most of the grade becomes externally examined, command terms start to carry the marks, and deadline density rises sharply across two years rather than one.

The decision that binds earliest is mathematics. A school that splits MYP 4 and 5 into standard and extended pathways is, in practice, sorting students towards Applications and Interpretation or towards Analysis and Approaches, and in some schools towards Higher Level or away from it. A student placed on the standard pathway in MYP 4 who later wants Analysis and Approaches at Higher Level has a gap to close in calculus and in proof, and it is far easier to close in MYP 5 than in the first term of DP1.

The table below maps the MYP years against what is newly assessed in each and the decision each one feeds. It is deliberately a planning document rather than a description: the useful question in MYP 3 is not how this year is going, it is which choice this year makes easier or harder in two years' time. Service as action and the projects run through all of it and are the part students most often leave until a deadline forces it.

Every private school in the UAE teaches its licensed international curriculum inside a national framework. Federally, private schools are not obliged to follow a specific curriculum beyond Arabic language, social studies and Islamic studies, and they must observe the Ministry's general regulations. That is the rule behind the mandatory subjects every emirate requires, and it means a Middle Years Programme student in this country carries subjects that sit outside the eight MYP groups and are graded on a different basis entirely.

Dubai's published requirements show how specific this gets, and they apply to the many Sharjah families whose children attend school across the border. Arabic, Islamic Education and social and moral studies are mandatory regardless of the licensed curriculum, with requirements to be implemented from the start of the 2025-26 academic year. Schools must organise separate classes for Arab and non-Arab students in Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, and combined classes for both groups are prohibited because the curriculum expectations and language of instruction differ.

Two further details matter to any tutoring plan. Instructional time for these subjects is calculated on a forty-minute lesson unit, schools may vary lesson length provided the weekly total is met, and the advice is that no mandatory-subject lesson runs shorter than twenty-five minutes. And the use of different or additional content for these subjects, without prior permission from the Ministry, is prohibited, which is why support here means working the student through the school's own material rather than substituting a tutor's own. In Sharjah, the Sharjah Private Education Authority regulates private education and also approves curricula and assessment methods for schools in the emirate.