Subject Specific Changes for 2025/2026

No more categories for Language and Literature

No more time-frame limitations (e.g. 10 year History rule or 5 year Economic rule)

IB EE Subject-Specific Pathways

Interdisciplinary Pathway

Subject Specific Pathway

Language A

Language B

Sciences

An extended essay in any of the science subjects—biology, chemistry, computer science, design technology, physics, and sports, exercise and health science—offers the opportunity to investigate and collect primary or secondary data, based on a focused research question. You collect evidence using scientific methodology. Your findings must lead to a valid, evidence-based conclusion.

Individuals & Societies

An extended essay in the individuals and societies subjects explores a question that connects to human experience and behaviour across time and space. If you are interested in developing a critical understanding of the complexities of our social world and who we are as humans, an extended essay in individuals and societies will be a very rewarding choice. The subjects in this group include business management, digital society, economics, geography, global politics, history, philosophy, psychology, social and cultural anthropology and world religions.

The Arts

An extended essay in the arts allows you to explore a topic of particular interest to you in dance, in music, theatre or visual arts. It can include a wide range of dynamic creative practices through which human beings convey ideas, communicate experiences, values and impressions, and develop identity. Any essay in this area should integrate the analysis of primary sources—such as artworks, live performances, music concerts, play texts, screenplays, scripts and scores—with disciplined research informed by scholarly methods, and provide a critical evaluation of the results. Secondary sources, such as books, critiques and magazine articles, interviews, subject journals and websites, must be used as evidential support for your argument.

Cross-disciplinary Subjects

Separately from the interdisciplinary pathway, you can do a subject-focused extended essay in one of the two DP subjects that are cross-disciplinary: Environmental Systems and Societies (ESS) and literature and performance. The transdisciplinary lens of ESS brings together two subject groups: individuals and societies and the sciences. Meanwhile, literature and performance combines studies in language and literature and the arts.

International Baccalaureate Organization. (2025). Extended Essay Guide: First assessment 2027. International Baccalaureate Organization.