IB MYP Maths Class 6 to 8: Group Classes on the Four Criteria

Marked on four things, not one

MYP mathematics is assessed against four criteria: A, knowing and understanding; B, investigating patterns; C, communicating; D, applying mathematics in real-life contexts. Each is scored from 1 to 8, and all four carry equal weight.

This is the single most important thing for a parent new to the IB to understand, because it explains the situation we are asked about most often: a child who is good at mathematics, whose arithmetic is accurate and quick, and whose MYP reports are mediocre.

Why a strong calculator of sums scores badly

A student who computes accurately is doing well at criterion A. That is one criterion out of four.

Criterion B asks them to investigate a pattern — to try cases, notice a rule, express it generally, and then justify why it holds. A student who finds the pattern and writes the answer has done perhaps half of what is being marked. Criterion C marks communication in its own right: appropriate mathematical language, more than one form of representation, and lines of reasoning a reader can follow. Criterion D asks for mathematics applied to an unfamiliar real context and requires evaluating whether the result and the assumptions behind it were actually valid — not just computing an answer. It is reliably the criterion students score lowest on.

Worth noting too: criterion A itself explicitly tests unfamiliar situations as well as familiar ones, so a student who has drilled question types rather than understood them stalls even there.

None of these is fixed by doing more exercises. They are separate skills, they are teachable, and most students have simply never been shown what a good criterion B response looks like.

Content still matters

There is a failure mode in the other direction, where a student becomes fluent in the language of investigations and cannot reliably solve an equation. MYP 4 and 5 assume real algebraic technique, and the DP assumes a great deal more.

So the content runs in parallel throughout: number — integers, fractions, decimals, ratio, percentage, standard form; algebra — patterns and sequences, expressions, linear equations; geometry — angles, shape properties, transformations, area, volume and the start of Pythagoras; statistics and probability — representing data, measures of centre and spread, simple probability.

The difference from a non-IB course is not what we teach but that the reasoning is written down from the beginning, because in MYP the writing is marked.

What an investigation actually looks like

Since the page has just claimed that most students have never seen a good criterion B response, it is worth saying what one contains.

A typical task gives a pattern and asks the student to explore it. A weak response works several cases correctly and states the rule. A strong response does four things: it works cases systematically rather than at random, it describes the pattern in words before trying to write it symbolically, it expresses a general rule, and it says why the rule must hold rather than only that it fits the cases tried. The last step is the one that is almost always missing, and it is the one that separates the top band from the middle.

Students find this strange at first, because in most of their schooling finding the answer ended the task. Here it is roughly halfway.

No external examination, which is the opportunity

Assessment in these years is internal to the school against the criteria. Nothing external is at stake yet.

That makes Classes 6 to 8 the right time to fix exactly the things that are hardest to repair later. A student who reaches DP unable to structure an argument will struggle with the Internal Assessment, and by then there is a timetable and an examination session in the way.

How the classes run

Live online group classes, a maximum of eight students, grouped by MYP year and level. Group teaching suits MYP unusually well: investigating a pattern aloud with other students, disagreeing about what the rule is and having to justify it, is close to what criterion B asks a student to do on paper.

We teach the content properly and the criteria explicitly, including showing students what a full-mark criterion B investigation actually looks like, which many have never seen.

Who this suits

Students in Classes 6 to 8 in an IB MYP school. Schools vary in how they map and label MYP years, so tell us your child's MYP year at the trial and we will place them by that rather than by class number.

The course also suits students transferring into an IB school from CBSE, IGCSE or a national curriculum, who typically arrive with solid technique and no experience of being marked on investigation and communication at all.