What the project is
In the final year of the MYP each student carries out a personal project: an extended piece of self-directed work built around a learning goal of their own choosing and a product or outcome that shows it. The student keeps a process journal, works with a supervisor, and submits a report. The IB's current Personal project guide sets the requirements, the criteria and the format of the report; it is the authority, it was revised recently, and a supervisor working from memory of an older version will mislead a student.
The project is required for a student to receive the MYP certificate and for a school's MYP to be validated, and the IB moderates a sample of each school's projects. That is why it is one of the few things in the MYP with both internal standardisation and external checking built in.
The three criteria, in plain terms
The current guide assesses the project against three criteria, each on the MYP's 0 to 8 scale. Read the strands in the guide; the summary below is what each one is asking for.
- Planning — a learning goal that comes from a personal interest and is explained as such; an intended product with success criteria the student wrote; and a plan that is clear and detailed enough to follow.
- Applying skills — the approaches-to-learning skills the student used, explained with evidence, both to reach the learning goal and to make the product.
- Reflecting — the impact of the project on the student and their learning, and an evaluation of the product against the success criteria they set at the start.
The supervisor's job, and its limits
A supervisor is not a co-author and not a marker of drafts. The role is to meet the student at agreed points, ask the questions that keep the project honest, check that the process journal is being kept as things happen, and confirm at the end that the work is the student's own. Schools set the number of meetings; three well-timed ones at the start, the middle and before submission do more than weekly chats that turn into instruction.
The most common supervisor failure is generosity. A supervisor who suggests the goal, fixes the plan or edits the report has made the project easier to assess and harder to defend, because moderation looks at whether the student's own thinking is visible. The second most common is absence: a student whose supervisor never asked to see the journal in month two is the student whose journal is written in month five.
The coordinator's calendar
The project runs across a school year and the coordinator owns the dates. A working shape, adjusted to the IB's submission deadlines for the session:
- Term before — launch: what the project is, examples of goals that worked, the criteria in student language, the journal expectations; supervisors assigned.
- First month — goal and plan agreed with the supervisor; success criteria written; first journal entries checked.
- Middle months — the making, with a supervisor meeting; a coordinator spot-check of journals for the students supervisors are worried about.
- Two months before submission — product complete; report drafting; academic integrity confirmed.
- Submission month — reports and journal extracts collected in the required format; internal standardisation; marks and the moderation sample uploaded by the IB's deadline.
Standardise before you submit
Because several supervisors assess projects, the school must standardise their judgements before marks are submitted. Run it exactly like a subject standardisation meeting: a handful of anonymised projects across the range, marked independently against the criteria, then argued strand by strand until the department agrees on anchors. Supervisors mark their own students with months of goodwill behind them; the meeting is where the goodwill is corrected.
Keep the record of the meeting and the anchors. The IB's moderation feedback will tell you whether your school's marking was in line, and a school that can compare that feedback with its own standardisation notes learns something; one that cannot just gets a number.
Where projects go wrong
The same problems appear in moderation feedback year after year, and almost all of them are visible early enough to fix.
- A goal that is really a product. "Make a short film" is a product; "learn to tell a story visually, shown by making a short film" is a goal with a product. The criteria assess the goal.
- Success criteria written after the product, to fit it.
- A journal written retrospectively, in one voice, on one day.
- Skills claimed without evidence: "I used research skills" rather than what was searched, found, rejected and why.
- Reflection that describes the process again instead of evaluating the product against the criteria and saying what changed in the student.
- A report that ignores the format and length limits in the current guide.
