A student can know the unit cold and still come out of an MYP on-screen exam with a 4. That isn't bad luck. The exam asks for something different from what revision usually practises.
The conversation usually starts after a mock. A Grade 10 student who does well in class tests sits a practice e-assessment and comes back with a grade nobody expected. The content was familiar. Nothing on the screen was new. And the feedback, when it comes, says things like "partially addresses Criterion D", which tells a parent almost nothing.
The instinct is to revise harder: more notes, more flashcards, the whole unit again. Sometimes that is the answer. More often the student already knows the content, and the marks are going somewhere revision never reaches.
First, what the e-assessment actually is
The MYP e-assessment is the IB's optional external assessment at the end of MYP 5. Schools choose whether to register students. Many IB World Schools in India don't, so the first thing to check is whether your child is entered at all. If they aren't, the school's own MYP assessments are still marked against the same criteria, and almost everything below still applies.
For schools that do enter, there are broadly two routes, depending on the subject:
- On-screen examinations are sat on a computer, under timed conditions, in the May or November session. They typically cover subjects such as language and literature, mathematics, the sciences, individuals and societies, and an interdisciplinary paper.
- ePortfolios are coursework marked by the school and moderated by the IB. They typically cover subjects such as language acquisition, the arts, design, and physical and health education, plus the Personal Project.
Which subjects go which way, and which ones your school enters, is a question for the school's MYP coordinator. Check it rather than assuming. Arrangements change, and this article is no exception to that.
Marked on criteria, not on percentages
This is the part that changes how a student should prepare.
An MYP subject is not marked out of 100. It is assessed against four criteria, usually labelled A to D, each marked from 0 to 8. In the sciences, for instance, they cover knowing and understanding, inquiring and designing, processing and evaluating, and reflecting on the impacts of science. Mathematics has its own four, including one for communicating and one for applying maths in real-life contexts. The criterion totals then convert to a final grade on the 1–7 scale using grade boundaries.
The consequence is easy to miss. Content knowledge mostly feeds one criterion. A student who revises only content is preparing seriously for roughly a quarter of the assessment and leaving the rest to chance. A science student can know every definition in the unit and still score poorly on the criterion about evaluating a method, or the one about the wider impacts of science. Those are skills, and they need practice of their own.
It also explains why the feedback reads so strangely. "Partially addresses Criterion D" is not vague. It's precise, but in a language nobody at home has been taught.
Three ways MYP students lose marks they had earned
In our experience, when a strong student under-performs on an MYP e-assessment, the marks go in one of three places.
1 · They answer the question, not the criterion
The student writes a correct answer that doesn't show what the criterion rewards. A typical example: asked to discuss the implications of a scientific development, they explain the science accurately and stop. The explanation is right. It just doesn't do what the question was set to assess. Their teacher would recognise that they understand it; the markscheme can't give credit for a skill that isn't on the page.
2 · They misread the command term
State, describe, explain, evaluate, justify and discuss are not interchangeable. Each one sets a different expectation for depth, and the mark allocation follows from it. A student who describes when the question asked them to evaluate has written a perfectly good answer to a different question.
The IB publishes its command terms with definitions in the subject guides. A student who knows them well, and has practised answering each one, stops losing marks this way surprisingly quickly.
3 · They meet the format for the first time on the day
An on-screen exam is not a paper exam on a screen. Students may be working with on-screen tools, typed extended responses, and stimulus material such as video, data or interactive elements. They have to manage the clock across a whole paper rather than a single question. Students who have only ever practised on paper spend real time in the exam working out the interface, and it costs most in the final section, where the higher-mark questions often sit.
Alyana, one of our MYP 5 students, described exactly this starting point in her own words: "When I started, I struggled with answering questions according to the markschemes and completing papers within the given time." Neither of those is a content problem. Both can be fixed with practice. Read her full review on the MYP page
What preparation that works looks like
None of this needs a secret. It needs practice aimed at the criteria rather than the chapter.
- Practise against the criteria, not just the topic. For each subject, the student should be able to say in plain words what each of the four criteria rewards, and write one answer aimed squarely at each.
- Mark practice answers against the markscheme, criterion by criterion. A single grade on a practice paper is about as useful as a single percentage on a school test. It says something went wrong without saying where. A breakdown by criterion shows which skill is leaking.
- Drill command terms deliberately. Take one topic and answer it six ways: state, describe, explain, evaluate, justify, discuss. It's dull, and it works.
- Rehearse the on-screen format under real timing. Use the IB's specimen or past on-screen material where the school can provide it, and do at least some full papers in one sitting, on a computer, against the clock.
- Look a year back. Gaps that show up in MYP 5 are often left over from MYP 3 and 4. A student who never quite got algebraic manipulation or a particular science skill in an earlier year will meet it again in the final year, under exam conditions.
What to find out this week
- Is your child registered for the MYP e-assessment, and in which subjects? Which subjects are on-screen exams and which are ePortfolios? Your school's MYP coordinator can tell you.
- Ask for their most recent criterion scores, not just the grade. For each subject, which criterion is lowest? If it's the same letter across several subjects, that's a skill gap, not a content gap.
- Find out how much on-screen practice they have done, under timed conditions, on a computer. If the answer is "mostly on paper", that's the cheapest marks available.
- Check the deadlines for anything ePortfolio-based, including the Personal Project. These run on internal school deadlines that are easy to lose track of next to exam revision.
If the criterion scores are healthy and the grade still isn't moving, the problem may be somewhere else entirely, such as attendance or consistency. We've written about how to tell those apart in Your child works hard and the marks haven't moved.
How we run this
StudyWise teaches the MYP one-to-one and online, and for MYP 5 students preparing for the e-assessment, we run an MYP test series. Practice papers are timed and set in the on-screen style. They're marked against the MYP criteria, and the student sees which criterion lost the marks and why. One paper a month is marked concept by concept and criterion by criterion. The joining diagnostic covers the previous year's material, because that is usually where the MYP 5 gap was created.
Classes are sixty minutes, weekly, in the same slot, with the same teacher. Parents get a written update once a month: what was attended, what was attempted, what was scored, and what we did about it. More on how we teach the programme is on our MYP tuition page, and for students moving into the Diploma, on our IB page. If your child's school runs Cambridge or Edexcel IGCSE in Grades 9–10 instead of the MYP, see our IGCSE page. And for MYP 5 students already thinking about US universities, our SAT page explains how SAT preparation can start alongside school.
Tell us the MYP year, the subject and the last set of criterion scores. In one free diagnostic class we'll work out where the marks are going, including when the answer is that you don't need us. Book a free diagnostic class or message us on WhatsApp.