First, your personal academic experience as a University student should help: you have completed papers during your time in University and this experience should be enough to let you appreciate the quality of your student(s)' work.

Secondly, the subject specific guidance pages in the Extended Essay Guide are also here to help you understand what the IB expects from a student's extended essay in the subject you are supervising: a biology extended essay does not imply the same requirements than a history extended essay, for example. These pages are here to indicate both to the student and the supervisor what must be avoided and what should be encouraged in the research and writing process.

You will meet at least three times over the process. These meetings are mandatory and students must write a reflection after each of these three meetings. These reflections are included in the assessment process and contribute to determine the grade for criterion E (engagement).

Apart from these three mandatory meetings, you are allowed to meet with your student(s) for a total amount of time that must not exceed 5 hours (including the three mandatory meetings). This limit is strict and if a student were to spend more time with their supervisor, the IB may not let the school submit their work (meaning that the student would be failing to obtain the IB Diploma).

How often you and your student(s) are going to meet will depend greatly on your student(s)' engagement with the research, on the subject you are supervising and on the complexity of the topic that your student(s) is dealing with.

It is a good idea to send them an email to ask simply how they are doing so far with the EE. If you do not hear from your student(s) after that, you should let me know and I will be jumping in to figure out what the problem is. Remember that the EE Coordinator is here to support both the students AND the supervisors.

The choice of topic should is the student's responsibility. Ours, as supervisors, is to provide guidance on the viability of the topic: deontologically, we should help the student figure out a topic that we know they can address as High School students in a 4,000 word long paper.

It is probably important to start first with what you should not write in this section: you should not write anything that aims at convincing the examiner that the student's work deserves this or that grade. This is their job. Our job is to help them ensure that the evaluation is taking into account not only the final product but the whole student's learning experience too.

In this perspective, the supervisor's comments should focus on all the process-related aspects that are not visible in the student's essay: how difficult it may have been for the student to determine a viable topic and a research question; what kind of difficulties the student went through in the research process; but also more importantly how the student found the resources to overcomes these difficulties and make this learning experience fruitful.

There isn't and the place allocated physically on the EE Reflection, Planning and Progress Form (EE-RPPF) is quite large. But it does not mean that the supervisor should write extensively: the quality of the comments are far more important than the quantity. The rule thumb is to ask ourselves, as supervisors, this question: is this information useful for the examiner to understand what happened in the backstage of the Extended Essay process?

Depending on the subject that you are supervising student work for, these comments can be substantially longer: EEs in Sciences require lab time and processes that deserve further comments from the supervisor. Such processes do not usually take place in social studies EEs such as History or Economics and thus the comments may be much more synthetic in that regards.