Categories of EUR

Category 1 EUR

For Category 1 the externally assessed components of a candidate’s work are remarked by a senior examiner. In practice for chemistry only Paper 2 and Paper 3 will actually be remarked as the multiple choice answers for Paper 1 were optically read and, unless it was a sample script, the IA was never seen by an external assessor (except in pandemic times), and even then it was only moderated. A candidate’s grade may be raised or lowered as a result of a Category 1 enquiry. In the past the grade either stayed the same or increased but could not be lowered. Some schools took advantage of this and paid for all their students’ work to be remarked in the hope that some would go up. Now that the mark can also be lowered this practice has stopped. The fees for EURs are listed in ' Fees and Billing information for IB World Schools'. If the grade is changed then the cost of the enquiry is reimbursed. Before requesting a Category 1 enquiry it is worth looking at the marks the student actually received for the four components and seeing how close they are to a grade boundary. Students who only require one or two more marks on Paper 2 or 3 to push them into the next grade are more likely to be successful than those who are in the middle or closer to the lower grade boundary. However examiners are told to mark using exactly the same criteria and standard that they used before and are not looking to give extra marks just because it is an EUR. Very rarely an error, such as one whole question or part question being missed by the first examiner, is found but this is very unusual and most EURs do not result in a change of grade. Just occasionally if there is a serious problem and five candidates’ work is remarked and found to be different by an average of 4% the IB will remark all the students work in that subject from your school at no extra cost.

Category 2 EUR

A school can request all the students’ work for a single component of the externally assessed work to be returned in electronic form. Currently only Papers 2 and 3 can be returned not any of the IA samples. This can be useful if you are a new teacher and you wish to see how your students actually performed on certain questions. Examiners are instructed to write useful comments, particularly whenever there is doubt about whether to award a mark or not, and these comments can be helpful to you too.

Category 3 EUR

Until May 2012 it was not possible to get the IA marks altered unless there were serious grounds for suspecting that the moderation has been unfair. Since then schools may apply for a Category 3 re-moderation on the sample of candidates’ internally assessed work sent for moderation. Details of this can be found in the IB Diploma Programme Assessment Procedures which your IB Co-ordinator will have.

The re-moderation of the school's work is based on the original sample. For schools where both SL and HL candidates were entered the re-moderation will affect both higher level and standard level candidates for the subject. Note that the grades may be raised due to re-moderation, but will not lowered. A remoderation cannot be requested unless the mean of the candidates’ moderated internal assessment marks are 15% or more different from the mean of the marks awarded by the teacher (their raw marks).

Re-moderation will not normally be undertaken by the original moderator (this may only happen in subjects which have a small number of candidates - chemistry does not fit into this category). Since the sample work will need to be sent from the original moderator to a second moderator, the time taken to undertake a re-moderation is dependent the availability of examiners.

The fee for this service is per school sample. The fee will not be refunded on the occasions when one or more grades are raised. This is because of the significant costs incurred by the IB in implementing this service.