During the course of your math IA, you are entitled to only one official written feedback from your teacher, in accordance with IBO policy, so you better make the most out of this opportunity. Nevertheless, your teacher may happily provide occasional oral feedback to students who proactively ask for it. Although it is the teacher who gives you the feedback, your role is also essential in extracting useful feedback from them and effectively utilizing it to improve your draft.
Here are some suggestions to elicit quality feedback:
Submit a complete first draft
You will receive feedback covering all criteria of a math IA only if you submit a complete first draft. If your IA is incomplete or contains mechanical errors, such as mistakes in labels and figures and citation errors, you have no grounds to complain even when the teacher is giving feedback that feels closer to nitpicking and micromanaging. After all, how can your teacher focus on the bigger picture to give you holistic feedback if you haven't given them the full picture to begin with?
When it comes to your IA drafts, treat the first draft deadline as if it is your final deadline. Hold your first draft to the high standards as you would for your final submission to the IB. Trust me, even at this stage, you will be surprised at how many careless mistakes you might have missed and how much room there is for improvement.
Be proactive
Outside of the official feedback, you can casually ask the teacher for quick tips and general guidelines. You should be proactive and schedule short meetings with your teacher to receive sufficient feedback. However, some teachers may be highly strict about upholding the IB policy. Therefore, when you are asking for brief oral feedback, you should ask a specific question, rather than general feedback. For example, you can show them a paragraph or a graph, express your particular area of concern, and ask for directions for improvement. Remember to take notes during oral feedback; you can use voice recording if the teacher consents, but otherwise write down quick notes.
Examples of voice recording apps that have built in features for transcribing speech-to-text and generating summaries.
Otter.ai
Parrot.ai
Refer to the criteria
During the feedback session, you should try to ask for criteria-specific feedback if your teacher tends to be vague. Here are several examples:
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With regards to criteria A, what am I lacking and how can I improve?
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In criteria C, what would be my current score?
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What issues should I resolve foremost if I want to improve from a 3 to 5 in criteria E?
Listen, Understand, Clarify, Act (LUCA)
Nothing’s worse than a student who comes back with the same mistakes unaddressed, even when the teacher specifically asked him to fix them beforehand. To prevent this, you should try to minimize any loss of information by properly documenting all feedback from your teacher.
For oral feedback, use voice recording tools like Otter.ai or Parrot.ai (there are countless free-to-use tools out there). For written feedback, teachers may have their preferred method of providing feedback. Ideally, your teacher should use methods that maintain a traceable version history of documents. This approach ensures transparency — making it easy to track suggested changes and approvals — and accountability, reducing confusion over revisions.
If your teacher allows you to choose how to receive written feedback, share a Google document of your IA and ask your teacher to leave comments or suggestions. When uploading a Microsoft word document to Google Docs, caution is advised as some equations, fonts, symbols, and graphs may be damaged.
You can also use Microsoft Word, as it also feature to track changes and manage revision history. Microsoft Word should be more resistant to text/symbols going missing (as long as everyone’s using recent versions of Microsoft Office).
The most reliable method of file transfer is in PDF format; you can hand over your first draft after converting it to pdf. The teacher can then make comments on PDF using software like Adobe Acrobat or handwrite annotations using an IPad.
If your teacher prefers the old-fashioned way of doing things, printing out your entire IA draft for him to leave comments on isn’t a bad idea either.
After you have received the feedback, you should ensure you comprehend all the feedback clearly and apply it to your IA. If you receive feedback that you cannot understand or agree with, you should not simply neglect it. In such a case, you can kindly ask the teacher to clarify their comments or receive external help from a tutor. Also, if you become lost on how to follow the feedback provided by your teacher, who may refuse to elaborate on further directions due to IB policy, you might need a tutor.