What MYP eAssessment is, and who it is for
MYP eAssessment is the IB's externally validated assessment at the end of the Middle Years Programme, taken at around age 16, leading to the MYP certificate. It exists because schools and families wanted external verification of achievement at the end of a programme that is otherwise assessed by teachers.
It is a choice. A school running the MYP is not obliged to enter its cohort, and many do not. What is required of authorised schools with Year 5 students is entry for the personal project, which is externally validated on its own.
The IB's published eAssessment procedures and the current subject guides are the authority on formats, entry rules and deadlines. Treat anything here as orientation and check the current cycle, because the detail moves.
The two formats, and why they behave differently
eAssessment comes in two shapes, and a school preparing for one is not thereby prepared for the other.
On-screen examinations are sat under examination conditions, generally lasting around two hours, and are marked by IB examiners. They are used in language and literature, sciences, mathematics and individuals and societies, and in interdisciplinary learning.
ePortfolios are collections of student coursework, externally moderated by IB examiners rather than marked cold. They cover language acquisition, physical and health education, arts and design. The work in them is produced across the course rather than on an examination day, which is why a school that starts thinking about them in the final term has already lost the material.
What the certificate actually requires
The structure is worth knowing precisely, because it changes which students you enter and for what.
A candidate for the MYP certificate takes eight eAssessments across the required subject groups, interdisciplinary learning and the personal project. Each is graded 1 to 7 and each carries equal weight, so the maximum total is 56. The published passing requirements set both a total and a floor on individual results, so a candidate can reach a comfortable total and still miss the certificate on one weak component.
That last point is the one that changes practice. A cohort strategy built on maximising the total will not protect a student whose single weakest subject falls below the floor, and the current published passing criteria are the authority on exactly where that floor sits.
The personal project, which is not optional
The personal project is externally validated for authorised schools with Year 5 students whether or not the school enters candidates for anything else. It is also the component most often left to run itself.
It has a supervisor, a process journal, a product and a report, and it fails quietly rather than loudly: a student who has not started by the deadline you did not enforce is discovered in the term when nothing can be done. Supervision is light by design, but light is not the same as absent, and the coordinator needs a view across the cohort rather than a supervisor's word for it.
What the IT side actually needs
On-screen examinations are sat on machines, under conditions, at the same time. That is an infrastructure question before it is an assessment one, and it is worth answering a year early rather than in the week of.
The things schools underestimate are rarely the machines themselves. They are the number of simultaneous candidates the room and the bandwidth can carry, what happens when a machine fails mid-session, whether the invigilation arrangements meet the requirements, and who in the building can actually fix something during a live session. The IB publishes guidance on the technical requirements and the school's own trial runs are what turn that guidance into confidence.
- How many candidates can sit simultaneously in the space you have
- What the contingency is when one machine fails during a session
- Who is on site with the authority and knowledge to intervene
- Whether a full-scale technical rehearsal has been run with the real cohort
The two-year preparation, not the two-week one
The most useful thing a school can understand about eAssessment is that it assesses the MYP as taught, not a syllabus that can be revised for.
On-screen examinations present unfamiliar material and ask students to apply criteria-based skills to it. A cohort taught through the MYP criteria across Years 4 and 5, marked consistently against them, and used to unfamiliar stimulus will meet the format and recognise it. A cohort taught content and tested on recall will meet a paper that asks for something it has not practised.
That reframes preparation from revision to teaching. The specimen materials and past papers on the IB's resource centre are for familiarity with the format, and they are not a course.
The ePortfolio problem, and when to solve it
ePortfolio subjects need coursework produced under the right conditions, retained, and organised well before submission. The failure mode is mundane: the work exists, somewhere, in a form nobody can assemble.
The practical requirement is that from the start of Year 4 the work in those subjects is collected as it is produced, tagged to the criteria it addresses, retrievable per student, and stored somewhere that survives a teacher changing jobs. A school that does that has a submission task. A school that does not has a recovery project, usually conducted by the one teacher who kept their own files.
Predicting, and using the internal data you already have
Schools want to know how their cohort will do, and the only honest instrument is their own criterion data, applied consistently.
That means the internal marking has to be standardised before its predictions are worth anything. If two teachers in the same subject mark a criterion differently by a level, the cohort picture is noise. Standardisation is therefore not only an assessment-policy obligation; it is the thing that makes the forecast real, and the coordinator asking for predictions should ask when the department last standardised before believing the numbers.
Where a system helps, and where it does not
This section names our own product, so read it as that. Everything above is true whatever software you use.
eAssessment is an IB process, and the parts a school controls are the two years before it. That is where skodle does its work. MYP units carry the statement of inquiry, the global context and criteria-tagged tasks, so the teaching that eAssessment validates is planned against the criteria rather than against content. Criterion levels are recorded across Years 4 and 5 and the subject grade is derived from them, which is the data any honest prediction rests on. Standardisation runs as independent judgements with a visible variance and a recorded consensus, so the prediction is built on marking that has been reconciled. The personal project is a first-class record with a named supervisor and milestones, rather than a promise a student made in September. A gap detector reports objectives that are unmapped or under-assessed, which is the school-level version of the question eAssessment will ask.
The limit, stated plainly because it matters here more than anywhere: skodle does not carry the official IB route for registration or coursework submission. Entries and uploads happen in the IB's own systems, and nothing here replaces that.
What the school owns and what the IB owns
It is worth being clear about the boundary, because schools waste effort on the wrong side of it.
The IB owns the formats, the marking, the moderation, the grade boundaries and the certificate. The school owns the teaching, the internal marking and its consistency, the collection of coursework, the technical readiness, the entries and the pastoral work of getting a cohort to the day in reasonable shape.
Every one of those school-owned items is decided long before the series. None of them can be fixed in the final term, which is the whole argument for starting in Year 4.
The mistakes that cost a cohort
Four recur. Treating eAssessment as an examination to revise for rather than a programme to teach. Leaving ePortfolio coursework uncollected until the final months. Running the technical rehearsal too late to act on what it reveals. And entering a cohort on the strength of unstandardised internal marks, which produces a set of predictions the results then contradict.
None of them is about student ability, which is why schools are surprised by them.
