Looking at high-grade exemplars for Extended Essays from past students can be a valuable tool for gaining an insight into achieving a higher grade in your essay. However, don't forget that looking at exemplars of EEs that achieved a lower grade is also an important aspect as you can learn from the mistakes. Being able to see the criteria marks for an EE can allow you to focus on seeing where and how that student has picked up those marks, to then transfer this success to your own work. Exemplars can provide information, skills, content and messages in a way that no other teaching methodology can. Exemplars are a very useful way in which students can be helped to gain a firm understanding, in a concrete, contextual, and non-threatening fashion, of exactly what it is that is required of them in order to succeed to their desired level of achievement within a particular unit or in any particular assessment task.
However, Exemplars are not perfect, nor can they solve every problem that the educator has, nor are they the only possible way to improve a students’ level of understanding and/or results. A genuine concern that we, as educators can have, is the idea that providing exemplars 'gives students the answer' or that it leads to plagiarism, 'parroting' or copying. The problem of students copying or plagiarising the provided exemplars is a real one. There may be some students, even though educated about the concept of plagiarism, who are either oblivious or too tempted to ignore a provided exemplar and want to copy it directly.
Remember that an EE which is guilty of plagiarism can score 0 and lead to you failing the diploma entirely.