IB Digital Society SL

Paper 1 is structured short-answer work on the course concepts and terminology. Paper 2 asks for extended responses where you apply those concepts to contexts you have not seen before. Alongside these sits the internally assessed project. The IB publishes the current component structure, weightings and specimen materials on ib.org - confirm details there rather than relying on secondhand summaries.

The content volume is manageable; the marks come from analysis, not recall. The trap is being able to define a concept such as algorithmic bias but not use it to explain a specific case. Practise turning every claim into a cause, a consequence, an affected stakeholder and a possible response - that is what high-scoring answers look like.

No. Nothing in the assessment requires programming, networking or hardware knowledge. What helps is curiosity about how digital products and policies affect real people, plus the habit of reading a story about, say, facial recognition in schools and immediately asking who gains, who is harmed and what could be done differently.

IB retakes are possible in later examination sessions and are normally arranged through a school or the IB's retake processes. Entry deadlines and any restrictions depend on your candidate status and the session. The IB publishes current retake rules and dates, so check ib.org or speak to your DP coordinator before planning.

Start with the three areas of inquiry and the key concepts attached to each, because every question is marked against them. In parallel, keep an examples log: one page per case with stakeholders, impacts and a possible intervention. Finish with timed practice on full questions and a solid draft of your project inquiry well before deadlines.

Weak answers describe a technology and stop. Stronger ones name stakeholders, trace consequences, weigh competing values and discuss an intervention with its trade-offs. Other frequent losses: examples that are generic or out of date, ignoring the specific context named in the question, a project topic too broad to investigate, and evaluation replaced by description.

Computer Science asks how systems are built and how computation works. Digital Society asks what digital systems do to people and institutions - power, access, privacy, regulation, culture - and how those effects might be changed. It behaves much more like a social science with a technological subject matter, which is why the writing demands differ.

Pick a narrowly defined, locally observable issue you can actually gather evidence on: a school's phone policy, a service that has moved to digital-only sign-up, broadband access in a particular community. Broad global titles like 'AI and society' produce vague projects. Mark your draft against the published criteria before submission.

Sessions run in May and November, and your school enters you for the appropriate one. Exact dates, entry deadlines and any adjustments are published by the IB for each session, so check ib.org or ask your DP coordinator. This site is an independent study resource and does not set or administer the assessment.