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Length of IA labs


Nemandi

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Hello.

I was just wondering how long your biology IA labs were, including title page, appendices, works cited?

How many pages in total would be reasonable?

More specifically, how long of a conclusion is long enough to cover everything?

I think I could be able to go on and on for 10 pages of conclusion (excluding evaluation), but I think that's obviously not what IB wants? (Even though this is internally assessed...)

An unrelated question: can there be some handwritten parts? Such as the labelling of hand-drawn diagrams?

Thanks.

Edited by Nemandi
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I wrote my first biology lab report before a week, and i am doing the second one and the deadline is after two days. I do not have much experience, but my last Lab was about 2000 word. Including diagrams it was about 10 pages. I used to draw some figures, with pencil and my techer told that i can drw them by pencil. The length is something dependant on the lab, and the data you collect. You should go through criteria, if you fulfill it by 100 words (which is not a true) its okay. 10 pages for conclusion is to much.

I wrote a comment 5 days, in which i wrote:

Finished from the first lab report, with word count =2000 words. Is this too much?

And i got two totally different comments:

[quoteDec 10, 2010 - 21:01 · Delete · Unlock · Lock

IB-Adam Dec 11, 2010 - 00:12 · Delete

It can never be too much in lab reports :P, unless if you're bull****ting...

Drake Dec 11, 2010 - 03:14 · Delete

Word counts are overrated. Mines are usually AT LEAST 1600+ and my IA's generally hit 3k unless otherwise restricted (history =/)]

So it is something that depend on you, but you should do what the criteria requested.

This is what is requested to write in your lab report:

i) design:

- Specific Title

- Introduction (Peferable if design)

-Aim and Varibales (2marks)

- Hypotheses (Justified)

-Methodology: i) Materials ii) Procedure (It should contain how you will controll variables and how you will collect data) (4marks)

ii) Data collection and processing:

- Data collection (2 marks) (of the dependant variables)

-Data processing and analysis (2 marks)

-Presenting (Graphs and tables)

iii) conclusion and evalution;

-conclusion (2marks)

-Evalution ( 1) Sources of error: i)Systemetic ii) Random

2) Ways of improvement

*References (Must if design)

So your lab should be complete and word numbers are not important.

This was give by my chemistry teacher who i trust, (He is an IB examiner)

More information can be got from drake comment in

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  • 2 weeks later...

I agree that the length does depend on the lab. We mostly wrote full lab write ups that were about 4000 words, but some topics were several pages shorter. Our introductions were thorough and researched and took up pages. I didn't do conclusions longer than 2-3 pages. 10 does sound like too much, but if your teacher has a conclusion fetish like ours had an introduction one, then maybe it's not as long as it seems, and you can justify this if you followed a format that your teacher gave you or fulfilled the criteria posted above. It's not a bad thing to be enthusiastic about ways to improve the experiment and find a similar experiment that you could conduct. Once again, however, 10 pages does sound like too much given that I don't know what you're writing.

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