Why DP and CP need a different question than 'AI for teaching' generally
Most AI-in-education advice is written for a generic classroom: draft a lesson, mark an essay, message a family. DP and CP add a second layer most of that advice ignores — components with their own deadlines, supervisors, moderation rules and stakes: an Internal Assessment moderated against IB criteria, an Extended Essay with a supervisor's own record-keeping obligations, Theory of Knowledge, Creativity Activity and Service, and, for CP, a core the DP does not have at all.
The useful question in a DP or CP school is not "can AI help teaching" — it almost always can, somewhere — but "does this tool understand that an IA deadline and a homework deadline are not the same kind of thing." A tool built for a generic classroom usually does not.
Where AI genuinely helps across the DP core and CP components
The realistic uses are drafting and organising, not deciding or marking.
| Component | What AI can reasonably help with |
|---|---|
| Internal Assessment (IA) | Drafting feedback from a teacher's own notes on a draft; it cannot apply IB marking criteria. |
| Extended Essay (EE) | Drafting a supervisor's meeting-record language; the supervision and judgement stay human. |
| Theory of Knowledge (TOK) | Drafting discussion prompts or a first structure for an exhibition write-up to edit. |
| CAS | Drafting a reflection prompt; the experience, and whether it counts, is a person's call. |
| Predicted grades | None. A predicted grade is a professional judgement, not a figure a model should produce. |
| CP core (reflective project, service learning, language, PPS) | Drafting prompts and feedback from a supervisor's notes, the same as the DP core. |
Where AI should not be anywhere near the decision
A predicted grade, an IA mark, whether a CAS experience counts, and whether an Extended Essay is ready to submit are all professional judgements a teacher or coordinator makes, informed by evidence AI can help organise but never by a score AI produces. The IB's own guidance draws this line in general terms — high-stakes decisions should not be automated — and DP/CP components are exactly the high-stakes case that guidance is written for. See the future of AI in IB schools for the IB's published position in full.
A DP coordinator's practical checklist
Before letting AI near any DP or CP workflow, these are worth settling explicitly rather than by default.
- Does the tool distinguish an IA deadline from an ordinary homework deadline, or treat every due date the same?
- Can a supervisor's meeting record and feedback thread live with the component, or only in a separate chat log?
- Does anything reach a student before a supervisor has reviewed it?
- Is a predicted grade ever computed rather than entered by a person?
- Where do requests, and any student work sent with them, go — and what is retained?
How skodle helps
This section names our own product, so weigh it accordingly. skodle tracks DP and CP components — IA, EE, TOK, CAS, and the CP's reflective project, service learning, language development and personal & professional skills — as per-student records with a status, a due date, milestones, drafts and a supervisor feedback thread, so a coordinator sees the whole cohort's deadlines in one place rather than in each supervisor's own notes. skodle AI can draft feedback on a submitted draft from the supervisor's own notes, or a first structure for a TOK exhibition write-up or a CAS reflection, for the supervisor to edit and approve — nothing it drafts reaches a student until a person saves or sends it. See skodle for DP schools and skodle AI. Every new school can test this on real students in the free 30-day trial: start the free trial.
The limits, plainly and specifically. DP and CP components hold no marks or assessment criteria fields — skodle tracks status, deadlines and the supervision trail, not IB marking. A predicted grade is a plain typed value a person enters; nothing computes or suggests one. The CP core has no career-related-study model, CRS pairing or workplace-evidence structure of its own. AI drafting is included in every plan with a daily usage limit that depends on it, requests are processed by an external model provider, and skodle is not an AI detector and does not predict grades. For evaluating a platform across a whole IB school rather than one component, see the IB buyer's guide.
From a single tool to a connected workflow
The difference between using AI occasionally and building it into a DP or CP workflow is whether a draft, once accepted, stays connected to the component it belongs to — the same feedback thread, the same due date, the same student record — rather than living in a chat window that nobody can find again by the time moderation season arrives. A connected workflow moves roughly from curriculum, to a drafted lesson or resource, to assessment, to evidence, to the report a family eventually reads; a one-off chatbot session produces none of that trail.
Rolling it out without surprising a supervisor
AI drafting works best in DP and CP when a supervisor opts in rather than finds it switched on. Start with one component — feedback drafts on IA work in progress is the lowest-risk place — and let a handful of supervisors use it for a session before it reaches the whole department. Ask them afterwards what they edited most, since that is where the model's draft was weakest for this subject and this cohort, and worth knowing before wider rollout.
The rollout should also be visible to students in outline: knowing that a first-pass comment might be AI-assisted, always reviewed by their supervisor before it reaches them, is a reasonable thing for a student to be told rather than to guess at.
What this changes for a coordinator's own workload
The realistic win for a DP or CP coordinator is not that AI marks anything, but that the deadline-chasing, the reminder emails and the first drafts of routine feedback stop eating the hours that should go to the students actually at risk of missing a component. That is a modest claim on purpose: the components that matter most — judgement, moderation, a supervisor who knows the student — do not move.
