What the IB requires, and what the policy is actually for
An assessment policy is one of the written policies an IB World School is required to have, alongside the language, inclusion and academic integrity policies. It is requested at authorisation and looked at again at programme evaluation.
The IB's own programme standards and practices, and the current assessment procedures for each programme, are the authority on what is required. Anything below is a description of what schools put in these documents and what visiting teams ask about, not a substitute for reading those.
The point of the document is narrower than it looks. It is not a philosophy essay and it is not a staff handbook. It is the school's answer to one question: how do we decide what a student knows, and how do we make that decision consistent between two teachers, two subjects and two years.
Why most assessment policies fail their first real reading
The common failure is not a badly written policy. It is a well-written policy describing a school that does not exist.
A visiting team reads the document and then talks to teachers and students. The gap shows up immediately: the policy says criteria are shared with students before a task, and students say they usually see the rubric afterwards. The policy says standardisation happens each term, and the department cannot remember the last meeting.
So write the document against what the school does, then change the practice you are not willing to describe. A policy that promises less and is true is worth more than one that promises everything and is contradicted in the first conversation.
The philosophy section, kept short
Every policy opens with a statement of beliefs about assessment, and most of them are interchangeable. That is not a reason to skip it, but it is a reason to keep it to a paragraph or two and make it specific to your school.
The useful version answers why this school assesses at all, how assessment relates to the learning rather than following it, and what the school believes about the role of the student in the process. If a sentence would be equally true of any school on earth, it is decoration.
Formative and summative, and the balance between them
This section has to do more than define the two words. It has to say what the balance is in practice and what teachers are expected to do with the formative work.
The questions worth answering explicitly: how often is formative assessment expected, does it carry a recorded mark or only feedback, what happens to a summative task a student misses, and whether a student can reassess. The reassessment question in particular causes more parental disagreement than anything else in the document, and a policy that is silent on it has handed every teacher a different answer.
- How formative evidence is recorded, if it is recorded at all
- Whether reassessment is allowed, for whom, and how often
- What happens to missed and late work, and who decides
- How students are told the criteria, and when
How each programme is assessed, in its own terms
A continuum school cannot write one set of mechanics for all four programmes, because they do not share them.
The Primary Years Programme leans on feedback, student reflection and teacher self-assessment rather than formal marking. The Middle Years Programme works through published subject criteria, each marked on a scale, with the final subject grade derived from the criterion levels rather than averaged from tests. The Diploma Programme combines internally assessed work that the IB moderates with external examinations. The Career-related Programme adds its own core components.
Write each one separately, and state the derivation rules rather than implying them. A parent asking why a child with high test marks has a subject grade of 5 is asking a question your policy should already have answered.
Standardisation and moderation
This is the section most often missing, and it is the one that decides whether the rest of the policy means anything. Criteria only produce consistent grades if teachers apply them the same way, and they do not do that by default.
The policy should say when standardisation happens, who attends, what is brought to it, and what is recorded. The last of those matters most. A meeting where three teachers discuss a piece of work and reach an understanding has achieved nothing durable unless the agreed judgement is written down against the work, because next term nobody will remember which interpretation won.
- When standardisation happens, and whether it is before or after marking
- Who is required to attend, and what happens when they cannot
- What is recorded, and where a teacher goes to find last term's decision
- How disagreement is resolved, and who has the final judgement
Recording, reporting and what families see
The policy has to connect assessment to the report, because that is where assessment becomes visible to everybody outside the classroom.
State what is reported and how often, what a grade on a report is derived from, whether formative work appears, and how the school describes a student who has not yet been assessed in something. Unmarked work shown as a zero is the single most common way a reporting system misleads a family, and a policy that has thought about it will say so.
Access arrangements and inclusion
Assessment and inclusion meet here, and the two policies should point at each other rather than repeat each other.
The assessment policy needs to say how a student's access arrangements are identified, who holds the evidence, how arrangements apply to internal assessment as well as external, and who is responsible for requesting them from the IB where that is required. The IB's published access and inclusion documentation is the authority on what can be requested and what evidence supports it.
Where this policy meets academic integrity
The two documents overlap and should be written together, because a breach of academic integrity is discovered in assessment.
The assessment policy should say what a teacher does on suspecting a breach in a piece of assessed work, who it is escalated to, and what happens to the mark while that is resolved. It does not need to repeat the definitions, which belong in the integrity policy, but it must not be silent on the procedure, because the teacher who finds the problem is reading this document rather than that one.
Review, ownership and the date on the front
Say who owns the policy, who is consulted, and when it is reviewed. Most schools commit to an annual review and a named holder, usually the programme coordinator with the head of school.
Put the review date on the document and honour it. A policy dated four years ago tells a visiting team more about the school's review culture than any sentence inside it.
What a system has to do for the policy to stay true
This section names our own product, so read it as that. Everything above holds whatever software you use, including none.
The gap between a written policy and school practice is usually not unwillingness. It is that the practice the policy describes has nowhere to live, so it survives only as long as the people who remember it.
skodle is built so those sentences have a home. MYP criteria and strands are held as a definition layer versioned per subject, so a policy that describes how criteria are applied points at something real rather than at a PDF. Criterion levels are recorded and the subject grade is derived from them rather than typed separately, which is the mechanic parents ask about. Standardisation runs as independent judgements, a visible variance between them and a recorded consensus, so last term's decision is retrievable instead of remembered. Report cards are composed from those records. Every change carries an audit entry with the person who made it.
The honest limits: skodle does not carry the official IB route for registration and coursework submission, and none of this writes your policy or makes a judgement for you. It holds the practice so the document can describe something that exists.
The mistakes worth avoiding
Three recur often enough to be worth naming. Writing the policy as an aspiration rather than a description, which fails the moment anybody talks to a teacher. Copying another school's document, which produces a policy describing their derivation rules and their review cycle. And writing it alone, usually by the coordinator the week before it is due, which produces a document no department feels bound by.
The version that works is short, specific, written with the people who have to follow it, and reviewed on the date it says it will be.
