kingdomx

I think you have really good chances of increasing your scores. I had a friend last May who asked for his Chem and Math papers to be remarked and his scores in both subjects increased.  Also take a look at these informal statistics on TSR:  http://www.thestuden...ad.php?t=626025

If I were you I'd definitely go for it. After all, you will be refunded if your score increased. Good luck.

If you are really determined to try to get your grade up then you can remark, however if you main reason is so you transfer can transfer after a year of uni then I would question whether this was at all necessary. It may work slightly different in NSW to QLD, though I doubt it (and if anyone that is more familiar with NSW system clarify) but after about a year of university, no one is really going to care about your IB grade. How well you did in your first year of university in most cases will give you a better entrance rank and your IB score won't matter. For example, a few of my friends didn't get the grades they need to get into their first preference. Now they are just going to do a course at our local university for a year, get there rank high enough for the course they want during that year, the transfer next year. It could be different due to NSW using ATAR and QLD using QTAC, but I would check with the university if you are unsure whether you want to spend the money for a remark.

However, if you also just want a better score as well, go for it. I don't think you can have EEs remarked, but you have a good chance for the rest of the subjects so it might be worth a shot. And who doesn't want two more 7s.

You will also need to work hard. If you consistently practice throughout the programme, you can get a 7 easily.
By the sounds of it, you seem to be a Math person more than an English person. English A1 HL is a pain by the sounds of it. You literally have to study 20 books and then be prepared for an oral commentary on any one of them. Any other questions?

In my opinion Chemistry is one of those subjects where your final grade reflects how much effort you're willing to put into seeking help. I did HL as well and, as a non-mathematical person, really struggled with it. I definitely recall failing stoichiometry tests Along with more or less every other test we had. I'd say that my failure was 30% not revising but 70% mental block. Even if I had revised, I don't think I would've done very well.
I had a panic (a bit like you!) and found it very motivating. I collected up things I didn't understand and took them to the teacher for an explanation and kept bugging them until they finally gave me a version of the explanation which made sense. Unfortunately I had a really crap teacher and they singularly failed to help me understand anything. At all. I kept thinking I had it and then failing the questions (the IB does ask questions in quite a mean way which expects you to know quite a lot as a basic assumption -- if you don't 100% comprehend the theory it's very hard to even approach some of their longer Qs in the correct manner).

Chemistry was essential for me to get onto the course I wanted to take at University - also I didn't want to fail. Sooo I got myself a Chemistry tutor. All it took was 4 hours and a person who had the capacity to actually explain things with clarity (clarity for a non-mathematical person vs a mathematical one means something very different, in my opinion xP) and she saved my grade

So the reason I told that long and rambled story was basically: Chemistry HL is hard. Especially if you're not very mathematical. You have to understand everything and the way to succeed is to not let things rest but to use your panic to find the explanations and be proactive. I'd say the same for IB Maths.

It doesn't really get more or less mathematical (in my opinion) after the first chapter. It's just different kinds of Maths, some of it a little more common sense (I found I could cope with energetics quite easily, for instance) and some of it equally as mind-boggling as Stoichiometry. If it doesn't come naturally to you, keep bashing at it. Eventually you'll make a dent. And if you can't break through AND you don't need to take Chemistry... erm... don't!

I'm doing my History EE on the British Punk Movement and 1970s British politics, which is something I was previously interested in and had read about. I like to think my topic is a bit different and would be interesting to an examiner, but who knows maybe everyone does something like that. If you asked me to name a popular EE topic I doubt I could, and if I did it would have been luck. My advice would be to ultimately think about a question you are most interested in finding an answer to in a topic you have a genuine interest in. If you're going to be spending a lot of time on it then you might as well try and make it more enjoyable and interesting for you, rather than worry too much about whether it's popular or not. The chances are if you do that and give it some deep thought then it probably won't be a popular topic. Just think about something that you studied or have read about (or watched about) that really interested you, then do some research and I'm sure that potential questions will spring to mind.

Someone did give me advice that it is a good idea to chose something different or local, as examiners like to learn something new etc. but at the end of the day if the essay is something you're really interested in it's likely to be a better essay, and a lot less painfull to write.

You say your teacher says you lack an argumentative approach to your essays... In the essay I believe it's quite important to have an argumentative approach that looks at and evaluates different arguments about the question, and to not just come out with a narrative about the topic. As long as you bear this in mind and study the marking criteria you should be fine Or at least that's what I'm hoping for myself...

I'm no expert though, and am currently working on my EE, which at the moment is far from perfect!

Naturally if you make two extended essays of similar quality, one of which is on something overdone  and one on something not overdone, the latter is likely to get a bit better marks. It does depend on how much motivation and time you have to spend on your Extended essay -  I chose a topic on my home country as well (Finland) which is very rare so I am mainly doing primary research and I'm regretting it a bit now when I'm actually supposed to be doing it. The choice is yours, and you could also consider doing some less overdone aspect of the more popular topics.

Btw, procrastinating on my EE right now...

Hm I can't think of a reason. Can you list and/or describe the steps you're taking to upload this file? Starting from going to ibsurvival.com.

jbird, on Aug 01, 2010 - 20:05, said:

Well I think if you nicked something of mine, I don't think I'd know it was wrong as much as be angry xP To be dispossessed of something isn't really exercising your ethical judgement so much as a kinda basic "grrrrrrr" moment
I agree with you that religion can be a source of an ethical code, and historically a very important source -- what I'd disagree with is that it is the only source, i.e. the origin of all ethics. The way I see it, the reason why religion has been such an effective enforcer of ethical codes is that it's often fricking scary what they come up with as to what'll happen to people who fail to stick to it. I hate to pick on Catholicism, but their fire and brimstone version of what happens to people who don't stick to the code is, were I a Catholic, enough to make me want to leave the most straight up life I possibly could. Absolutely no adultery or coveting other people's cattle, etc. However, religion isn't the only source of an ethical code -- I can (and do) believe that we should treat others as we wish to be treated, but I don't do it because I believe I will be rewarded in an afterlife for living this way, or because I'm scared of what will happen to me if I don't. At least not since I was little, back then I was definitely scared xP I do it because it's another aid to help me coexist with the people around me, and so for me, it is intrinsically right and just to enable us all to get along, with me a happy part of it. I'd say that the reason it's a recurrent theme in societies worldwide is because it's more or less essential for any thinking people who want to live in a group. If we couldn't all get along with each other, there'd be no society.
In modern-day British society, a lot of our ethical code comes from Christianity because England has been, in turns, a Christian country ever since the Romans came. I think it's certainly fair to say that religion and society have done a lot of hand shaking over the years, but also that despite their obvious influences on each other, they could both be split with no detriment to the ethics of one or the other.

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Well there is a bit of an elephant and turtle situation with how God would have come to be -- in that to support the elephant, you need another turtle, and to support the turtle yet another elephant, and to support that... etc. -- but I've sort-of accepted that a God would, to be plausible at all, have to be immune to human faculties on that score. So assuming that he is (which I think is even more far-fetched than the probability thing, as it requires not only for every single bit of our Universe to have been designed, but also requires us to dogmatically believe in the existence of yet another thing), we would have to be incapable of understanding it. However, clearly it would have had to interface somehow with what we know to be the Universe in order to create and then later on continue to intervene in the Universe, which means that there would have to be things (or have been things) within our Universe which do not have to follow the laws of the Universe. Moreover, if things are given laws on a molecular level (in order to have these laws), why do we get things which are truly random (radioactive decay or particle collisions, for instance?).
Given that we know where molecules of different elements come from (stars), and that chemical reactions can happen, I find it significantly more probable that chemicals reacted with each other trillions of billions of times and hit lucky just once, than the following:
1. there is another universe we don't understand
2. it is an exception to all the rules of our universe
3. it can bend the rules of our universe and interact with our universe
4. but we can't see it or detect it in any way
6. our universe could only exist if it had been created
7. this other universe/being in it created our universe and has powers of creation which again go completely against all the rules of our universe
8. but it didn't have to be created itself
(9. this is kinda a side one, but that said thing then takes an interest in the daily lives and morals of everybody in our universe, as well as spending billions of years just observing our universe made of random sludge and elements until one day sparking off life and then watching the process of evolution)
And that's just looking at it from the perspective of probability. I mean it's infinitely more probable that molecules collided with each other in a favourable manner just once than that all the laws of our Universe need be rewritten, a whole new Universe invented etc.

I also don't see why our world needs to have had a guide to get to the stage it is now, or why anything complex automatically require something to have created it. I've always seen it as the ultimate assumption behind any attempt to include creation of any kind (even if it's simply just guiding evolution somehow). It's like me saying that the shells washed up by the tide must have been intentionally placed there because they're all in a line. I mean, clearly that example doesn't exactly hold (xP) but hopefully it illustrates what I mean: that we see intention where there doesn't have to have been any. I mean, somebody could have gone and put them all in a line. We happen to know otherwise, but if you assume that we hadn't yet seen the tide and didn't know otherwise, would you still say that because they're in a line, somebody must have placed them there and there's no explanation which doesn't involve intention?

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Well I don't pretend to know anything about the exact origins of the Bible --I don't think anybody does. However, it's precisely because nobody really knows that I think it's dubious. How do we know that 27 different people wrote it? How do we know that they weren't all sitting round a table somewhere colluding (paranoid, I know, but it's still a point)? How do we know that all 27 people are unbiased? Because 27 people tell us that the laws of the Universe were broken, they definitely were? To employ our favourite friend and do a bit of probability, it's stacked in the direction of the Universe continuing to follow the same rules it always has.
Usually in subjects such as History, we look for multiple pieces of evidence and check for bias. For all we know The Bible could be like taking an account of the Holocaust from the dethroned Nazi government -- I doubt it'd be a tale of terrible atrocities and woe. I'm absolutely not comparing the Bible to anything as awful as that, but my point is basically that people can write whatever they want, and even groups of people can write whatever they want. To say that the Bible is compelling evidence for anything is to jackknife away from the tests we apply to all other knowledge. When it's clearly not right to take the word of a single thing as the truth, and Historians dedicate their lives to trying to sift out the truth of events, why do we blanch from applying the same thoroughness to the Bible? All we have to suggest Jesus rose from the dead are perhaps a few eyewitness accounts written by an unknown and untested third party at some time which may or may not have been close to when the whole thing actually happened.
Even if the accounts are what those people genuinely thought, how many weird and wonderful things do we now know were mistakes? Like back when women were burned for being witches because they 'set people alight using their evil cats' or something. Human history is pretty woeful when it comes to having any idea what's really going on. Nowadays we laugh that people thought that when we know that petrol is colourless, very flammable and found in the same place that those people were. I did just invent that example, but hopefully it makes sense xP
If we treated the Bible the same way as we treat historical texts, then when it comes to evaluation of evidence, the whole thing would be like a sacrificial lamb :/

kman, on Dec 08, 2008 - 00:10, said:

Well, aside from the fact this comes from a flawed argument when it comes to the fact that you'd have to assume the statement that "God is identical with anything large and extremely powerful" to be true...

You'd be forced to proceed from this thought (that the statement is true) in the following manner:

1. God is identical with anything large and extremely powerful
2. To small insects etc. we (humans) appear large and all powerful.
3. Therefore we are gods.

...and presumably therefore move onto, by way of common fact: "We are not Gods". Therefore one of the two statements must be incorrect, #1 or #2. It's not #2 as we would and do appear large and all powerful to small insects etc. So presumbly the incorrect statement must be #1. God is not large and extremely powerful. Indeed, if we do not exist as Gods to insects, why does a God exist to us?

However, if this debate was meant to be about human superiority over animals, I believe we are superior to animals in a number of key ways, first and foremost being the fact we are self-aware. Only we can actually conceive of "superiority" (although presumably it might be analogous to physical dominance amongst animals), only we can recognise that we exist and reflect on that fact. It doesn't necessarily give us any additional rights, but it is a superior function, and the basis of our planet-wide dominance. That and opposable thumbs of course If total power can be considered "God-like", I suppose we could be considered as Gods to other animals.