Grade   Boundaries

                                    7           76-100%

                                    6           65-75%

                                    5           55-64%

                                    4           43-54%

                                    3           32-42%

                                    2           21-31%

                                    1            0-20%

Remember that these marks are those given after moderation etc. When your own work is marked by your teacher hopefully they will be marking to roughly the same standard as the IB but it will not be exactly the same as the principal external examiner's marks.

To show the actual marks and grade boundaries for two successive years I've given the raw marks required for each component and the actual grade boundaries for the TZ2 components for the two years 2018 and 2019 (The total overall grade boundaries for the comparable TZ1 papers are given in red). I've not updated it to the years 2020 and 2021 as they are not typical due to the disruption caused by the Covid pandemic. You can see that there is some considerable difference as overall it would appear that the papers in May 2019 were easier when compared to those of May 2018 so higher marks were required to achieve the grade descriptors for each grade.

Since it varies from year to year (and from time zone to time zone) depending upon the difficulty of the examination the differences in the boundaries is probably not very significant and the approximations given above in the 'rule of thumb' are still a reasonable working assumption.