October Newsletter

Dear Grade 12 Students and Parents, 

We are over two months into the final year of the Diploma Programme, and the next two months will likely be the busiest. Nevertheless, this did not stop our Grade 12s from fully engaging in our High School Spirit Week. In fact, one of our Grade 12 groups won our annual Halloween Door Decorating event! 

As we look forward to the World Exams (schedule available below), students have completed their IB registration and confirmed their courses and particulars with us. 

Below, we have some highlights from the last two months as well as some reminders of what is to come. Experience Week is also just two weeks away, so whether students are on a local or overseas trip, keep an eye out for final communications from trip leaders. 

Internal and  External IB Assessments

This is indeed the busy season for "IAs" so I wanted to share with you again the following:

We are required by the IB to distribute throughout the two years of the programme the assessments that are submitted to the IB in the Spring of the final year of the programme. Your children will often refer to these as "IAs" (internal assessments) and, sometimes, "EAs" (external assessments). The similarity is that they are both submitted to the IB, the difference is that only some of the IAs from a cohort are submitted for moderation based on our suggested marks, while all the EAs are submitted, and we do not provide an indication to examiners where we think students have scored. 


All of the draft and final due dates for the IAs and EAs have been posted to your child's Google Classroom calendar by their teachers. However, to give you a sense of what their workflow is likely to look like this year, I have also prepared this document for your information. 


As noted in my introduction, the DP is very busy in Grade 12, and there are times when students are unable to meet deadlines. As a result, I want to share with you our late assessment policy.

IA Week

To support students in the completion of their internally assessed work, we organize four days each October where students are off-timetable and able to focus solely on the assessments they need to prepare for the IB. 

A lot of students use this week for dedicated lab time while others are completing essays, works of art or extended essays. The students worked hard and took advantage of the time that was made available to them; we hope it helped relieve a little of the pressure that is part of the Grade 12 year.

2024 World Exam Schedule

Theory of Knowledge Exhibition

The Theory of Knowledge (TOK) Exhibition is an opportunity each year to have our Grade 12 TOK students share with Grade 11 TOK students the three objects they chose for this IB assessment component. 

The TOK exhibition asks students to demonstrate TOK in the real world by choosing different objects. Each object is used to demonstrate an insight into one of 35 IB Knowledge Questions. An example of one of the knowledge questions is "To what extent is certainty attainable?". The Grade 11 students are now beginning preparations for their own exhibition.

The Extended Essay has now come to a close. All students have submitted their essays and are finishing their final interviews with their supervisors. 


We would like to thank the supervisors for taking on the responsibility of guiding students through the process. We also want to give a huge "thank you" to the students who hit all of our due dates extremely well. This is, of course, in no small part a result of the excellent leadership by our dedicated Extended Essay Coordinator, Mr. Perry. 

Mr. Lee will be emailing a CAS update to all students and parents this week. Please keep an eye out for this communication.