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Math HL IA Help!


Sreee

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Hey Everyone,

 

New to this site, so bear with me! I'm doing my Math HL IA on the Ramsey Theorem (a part of the set theory) and applying it, to prove the Party Problem. What I'm unsure about is the fact that our IA needs to be 'concise and coherent', but the theorem itself is such that it requires description to prove it. Will that maybe reduce my chances of scoring well? 

 

Thanks in Advance. xx

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Hey Everyone,

 

New to this site, so bear with me! I'm doing my Math HL IA on the Ramsey Theorem (a part of the set theory) and applying it, to prove the Party Problem. What I'm unsure about is the fact that our IA needs to be 'concise and coherent', but the theorem itself is such that it requires description to prove it. Will that maybe reduce my chances of scoring well? 

 

Thanks in Advance. xx

The short answer is: I'm not sure. 

 

the IB says that it "recommends" internals be between 6 and 12 pages long. I barely made mine fit to 12, and that was without counting my bibliography, so I hope they don't mind. I think that what they mean when they say concise and coherent is that you don't repeat yourself, or bore them with the same kind of calculation over and over again. I would think that they are reasonable people (hahaha, who are we kidding?) and that if your proof requires the extra pages, they won't take point off. 

 

Just in case, some tips for shortening your page number: 

  • use very small margins
  • don't overdo the subtitles // you don't need huge fonts
  • you can change the font size of the space between paragraphs to size 5 or 8 so that they are smaller
  • if you have graphs/tables, make them big enough to read, but don't leave huge spaces around them.

 

hope this helped! good luck :) 

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As a high school newspaper editor, I knew about being "concise and coherent", although this is rarely a determining factor in a Math IA. This often involves editing techniques where you combine sentences to make a seamless flow of logic. Here's an example you probably know: "in order to ____ , [action A] preceded [action B]" Here not only are you talking about the two actions, but you are also talking about their interrelationships and causal effects. This would be more effective than "First I did [Action A]. Then I did [Action B]. All this caused _____. It was in that order because __________." Techniques like this can shorten your paper by about 20%-35% for a typical draft. 

I think the only reason they put that there is that some students do not know their content well enough so they start talking in circles or vaguely. As long as you know you topic well, conciseness and coherence shouldn't be a problem.  

I do not completely disagree with what eross said

 

  • use very small margins
  • don't overdo the subtitles // you don't need huge fonts
  • you can change the font size of the space between paragraphs to size 5 or 8 so that they are smaller
  • if you have graphs/tables, make them big enough to read, but don't leave huge spaces around them.

If your writing / typesetting is too hard to read (too big or too small), the paper is going is appear longer to the reader. When you do not have much time to edit, make sure most if not all your paragraphs have an effective topic sentence, which helps to speed up the reading and make your paper seems shorter.

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Well, that's a relief! I've managed to scale it down to 12 pages, and I've kept in mind effective ways of presenting the logic, so I suppose that should do. Thanks again :D

I think being descriptive is not a problem. See this IB official exemplar for an example on Euler's Totient Theorem: https://ibpublishing.ibo.org/live-exist/rest/app/tsm.xql?doc=d_5_matsl_tsm_1205_1_e∂=2&chapter=4

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