Extended Essay and the Collaborative Sciences Project

📝The Extended Essay in chemistry

The Extended Essay is a 4,000-word piece of independent research on a topic of your choice, supervised but not directed by a teacher. If you write it in chemistry, the topic may come from the syllabus or may go beyond it — there is no requirement to stay inside the guide, and the best essays usually reach a little past it.

The guide suggests three fertile areas, and they are worth reading as a hint about what works:

What these have in common is worth noticing: each is a local, measurable question with a clear variable, not a survey of a large topic.

What makes a good research question

• Narrow enough to answer in 4,000 words. “How does the concentration of citric acid affect the rate of corrosion of aluminium at 25 °C?” is answerable. “Corrosion” is not.
• Chemical, not biological or environmental-studies-shaped. The essay must be assessed as chemistry, which means the analysis must rest on chemical principles — bonding, energetics, kinetics, equilibrium, mechanism — and not merely use chemistry as context. An essay about the effects of a pollutant on plant growth is a biology essay however much chemistry surrounds it.
• Grounded in your own data where possible. Primary experimental data is not compulsory, but a chemistry essay built on your own measurements almost always outperforms one built only on literature, because it gives you something genuine to evaluate.
• Supported by real theory. The strongest essays explain why the result came out as it did, at the molecular level, rather than only reporting that it did.

Practical advice

• Do a pilot experiment early. Most failed chemistry essays fail because the method did not work and there was no time left to change it. Run a trial the moment you have a question.
• Check the apparatus exists before committing. If your question needs a spectrophotometer your school does not have, it is not your question.
• Keep a research journal. The reflections you record in it feed directly into the formal reflection sessions and the reflection criterion, and reconstructing them at the end is both obvious and painful.
• Evaluate as seriously as you analyse. The same skills the IA rewards — specific weaknesses, propagated uncertainties, comparison with literature — are rewarded here.
• Reference as you go. Retro-fitting citations to a finished essay is the most reliable way to commit accidental academic malpractice.

🤝The Collaborative Sciences Project

The CSP is an interdisciplinary sciences project that every DP and CP science student takes part in. It is required but not assessed — no marks, and no submission — which is precisely why students underrate it.

Its purpose is to address a real-world problem that can be explored through the sciences, integrating the factual, procedural and conceptual knowledge of more than one subject. Working with biology, physics, environmental systems, design technology or computer science students, you identify a complex issue, research how interrelated systems and processes act on it, develop solution-focused strategies, and then evaluate and reflect on how hard solving real problems actually is.

It carries 10 hours of the experimental programme at both SL and HL, and it develops the collaborative skills — teambuilding, negotiation, leadership — that no written paper tests.

Two reasons to take it seriously despite its being unmarked. First, the collaboration and communication skills are exactly what the IA and the Extended Essay reward, and the CSP is the only low-stakes place to practise them. Second, it is a very good source of ideas: a genuine local problem you have already researched is a far better Extended Essay starting point than a topic pulled from a list.

📅Deadlines and support

Extended Essay deadlines are set by your school, not by the IB, and they are always earlier than they feel. The structure is broadly the same everywhere:

• Choose subject and supervisor — usually near the end of year one.
• First formal reflection session — on your topic, sources and initial plan.
• Experimental work — over the long break or early in year two, before examination pressure builds.
• Interim reflection session — on progress and difficulties.
• First full draft — the only draft your supervisor may comment on.
• Final submission, followed by the viva voce, a short concluding interview and the final reflection.

The three reflections total 500 words and are worth marks in their own right under the engagement criterion, so write them properly rather than in the last hour.

If you are considering a chemistry Extended Essay and want to talk a question through before you commit to it — whether it is narrow enough, whether it is really chemistry, whether the method will work — ask. That conversation is worth more than any amount of reading about how to write one.