Most school management platforms will tell you they support the IB. Fewer can show you a criterion being scored, an ATL skill attached to an assignment, or a PYP report that a coordinator would actually send home.<\/p>\n
The gap exists because IB requirements are not a feature you bolt on. They change the shape of assessment itself, and a system built around percentages and a weighted average struggles to represent them honestly. This is what to test, programme by programme.<\/p>\n
Worth stating plainly, because vendors often answer “yes, we support the IB” while meaning one of them.<\/p>\n
The PYP<\/strong> is inquiry-led and largely narrative. Assessment is evidence gathered over time against learning outcomes, and reporting leans on teacher commentary rather than a mark out of a hundred. A system that insists every assessment produces a number will fight the programme.<\/p>\n The MYP<\/strong> is the most structurally demanding. Four criteria per subject, each scored on its own band of 0 to 8, against published descriptors, with a best-fit judgement rather than an average, then a grade boundary table converting criterion totals to a 1 to 7 grade. Approaches to Learning skills are reported alongside. If a platform is going to break, it breaks here.<\/p>\n The Diploma<\/strong> is closer to conventional practice, 1 to 7 per subject, but adds internal assessment tracking, predicted grades, and the core: Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay and CAS.<\/p>\n Many schools run two or three of these at once. If yours does, every question below applies to all of them simultaneously.<\/p>\n The commonest fudge is a system that lets you create four assignment categories called A, B, C and D and weight them. That is not criterion assessment. It is a weighted average wearing a costume.<\/p>\n Real criterion assessment means a teacher scores a piece of work against each criterion separately, on that criterion’s own band scale, and the system keeps those scores as distinct facts rather than collapsing them into one number.<\/p>\n What to test:<\/strong> ask to see one assignment scored against four criteria, then ask what the student’s current standing in each criterion is. If the answer is a single percentage, the system does not do this.<\/p>\n SCL scores criteria individually with the band descriptors visible to the teacher as they mark, and keeps each criterion’s history separately.<\/p>\n The IB is explicit that a criterion level is a professional judgement about which descriptor best fits the body of evidence, not an average of everything a student has done.<\/p>\n A system that only computes the mean quietly forces teachers out into a spreadsheet at reporting time, which is exactly the thing you bought software to avoid.<\/p>\n What to test:<\/strong> can a teacher set a criterion level that differs from what the arithmetic suggests, with the previous scores still visible as evidence? Can they record why?<\/p>\n SCL supports a best-fit level per criterion on summative work, alongside the individual scores, and lets teachers attach a comment to the judgement.<\/p>\n Approaches to Learning is where a lot of implementations become theatre: a separate list somewhere, filled in once a term from memory because nothing connected it to actual classwork.<\/p>\n What to test:<\/strong> can an ATL skill be attached to the assignment that develops it, so the record builds itself as teachers teach? Can a coordinator see which clusters are covered across a year group and which are not being touched at all?<\/p>\n In SCL, ATL skills are tagged on assignments and unit plans, and appear alongside the marks rather than in a separate document.<\/p>\n A unit planner that is a glorified word processor is a document library, not a planning system. The value appears when the plan is joined to the work.<\/p>\n What to test:<\/strong> when a teacher writes a unit with its key concept, related concepts, global context and statement of inquiry, can the assignments that assess it be linked to it? Can a coordinator then see coverage across the year, and gaps, without opening every plan?<\/p>\n SCL’s curriculum center<\/a> holds unit and lesson plans with IB key concepts and learner profile attributes, subject objectives and standards, and reports coverage per subject and grade.<\/p>\n This is where a coordinator’s patience usually runs out. A PYP report and an MYP report do not look like an American report card, and neither can be produced by relabelling columns.<\/p>\n What to test:<\/strong> ask to see a finished MYP report, with criterion levels, the converted 1 to 7 grade, ATL reporting and teacher comments, generated from marks a teacher entered. Then ask the same for a PYP report. Then ask whether both can exist in the same school year for different divisions.<\/p>\n SCL ships PYP and MYP report card templates alongside American, British and IGCSE, and Egyptian national formats, and a school can run several concurrently across divisions.<\/p>\n An IB school is a school. It admits students, takes attendance, charges fees, runs buses and answers to parents. A specialist IB tool that does none of that leaves you buying a second system and reconciling the two.<\/p>\n What to test:<\/strong> can I see a student’s criterion levels, attendance and outstanding fees without changing systems? Do parents have one login for all of it?<\/p>\n This is the argument for a single platform rather than a specialist add-on. In SCL the IB tooling and the \u0633\u062c\u0644 \u0627\u0644\u0637\u0627\u0644\u0628<\/a> are the same system on one database, so a criterion level a teacher enters is on the student’s record immediately, and families see it in the \u0628\u0648\u0627\u0628\u0629 \u0623\u0648\u0644\u064a\u0627\u0621 \u0627\u0644\u0623\u0645\u0648\u0631<\/a> next to attendance and fees.<\/p>\n Two teachers marking the same criterion should be marking it the same way. Schools handle this with standardisation meetings, and the software should support the conversation rather than obstruct it.<\/p>\n What to test:<\/strong> can a coordinator see how criterion levels are distributed across teachers in the same subject and grade? That single view is what makes a standardisation meeting productive.<\/p>\n Take these into the demo and ask for each to be shown rather than described:<\/p>\n Any platform can say it supports the IB. These eight are the ones that separate a real implementation from a mapping exercise.<\/p>\n1. Criterion assessment has to be real, not a workaround<\/h2>\n
2. Best fit, not arithmetic mean<\/h2>\n
3. ATL skills have to attach to real work<\/h2>\n
4. Unit planning has to connect to assessment<\/h2>\n
5. Reports have to look like IB reports<\/h2>\n
6. It still has to be a school system<\/h2>\n
7. Ask about moderation and standardisation<\/h2>\n
The short version<\/h2>\n
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