What the exhibition is
Introduced for first assessment in 2022, the exhibition is one of the two assessed components of TOK, alongside the essay. The student selects one of the IB's fixed list of internal assessment prompts, chooses three objects, and produces a single file containing images of the objects and a commentary on how each one manifests the prompt. The Theory of knowledge guide and the year's coordinator notes are the authority for the requirements, the prompts and the word limit; check the current edition.
The exhibition is usually completed in the first year of the DP, so that the essay can have the second. Many schools hold an actual exhibition event where students show their objects to an audience; the IB encourages this, and it improves the work, but what is assessed is the file.
Choosing a prompt
The prompts are knowledge questions, fixed by the IB and the same for every student: questions like what counts as knowledge, how we distinguish knowledge from belief, what role evidence plays. A student must use one of the prompts exactly as written, without altering it, and should choose one they can connect to objects they genuinely know something about.
The commonest mistake at this stage is choosing the prompt that sounds most profound. The exhibition rewards a clear link between object and prompt, so the prompt to choose is the one for which the student already has three objects in mind.
Choosing objects that work
An object must have a specific real-world context: this particular thing, from this place or moment, not a generic image of the category. A photograph the student took of a specific street sign in a specific town works; a stock photo of a street sign does not. The object can be physical or digital, personal or public, and the student may photograph it rather than present it.
- Specific, not generic: a named painting, a particular tweet, their grandmother's recipe card, a page from a specific textbook.
- Chosen for the link, not for beauty: the question is what the object shows about the prompt.
- Three different angles: three objects that make the same point are one object three times.
- Justified: the commentary must say why this object, and what it contributes that the others do not.
The commentary and its limit
The commentary covers all three objects in a total of about 950 words, with the prompt stated, each object identified with its real-world context, and an explanation of how each manifests the prompt. The word count is a ceiling that includes everything the student writes about the objects; students who write 400 words on the first object have run out of room for the third.
Strong commentaries make a claim about the prompt through the object, not merely describe the object. Weak ones describe the object at length and add a sentence connecting it to the prompt. Students should be shown both kinds before they write.
How it is marked
The teacher marks the exhibition holistically on a scale of 0 to 10 using the IB's assessment instrument, which describes levels rather than a checklist; the question at each level is how convincingly the objects and commentary show how TOK manifests in the world. A sample from each school is moderated by the IB, and the school's marks are adjusted if the sample shows they were too generous or too harsh.
Because marking is holistic, standardisation within the TOK department matters more than usual. Two teachers reading the same instrument will disagree by a level or two until they mark a few exhibitions together; a department that standardises before submitting marks gets less surprising moderation.
Running it in a school
The exhibition is small, and schools that treat it as small run it well.
- Introduce the prompts early in year one and let students collect candidate objects over a term.
- Show exemplars at different levels, with the commentary marked up.
- One structured check-in before writing: prompt chosen, three objects with contexts, one sentence on each link.
- A firm internal deadline a month before the school needs the marks, and an exhibition event the week after.
- Standardise a sample before marks are entered; keep the anchors for next year.
