A parent who searches for IB changes in 2027 will find History, because History is the redesign teachers are writing about. History is not a 2027 change. It is first taught from August 2026 and first assessed in May 2028. The same parent will find pages about new IB Mathematics, which is a 2029 change. They will find little about Computer Science, Design Technology, and Visual Arts, all three of which are 2027 changes. The year in the headline and the year in the exam hall are usually different, and the gap is where families lose the thread.
The cause is structural rather than careless. The IB reviews every Diploma course on a seven-year cycle, one subject at a time, so at any moment several courses sit at different points in that cycle. The IB publishes its own index of these changes and organizes it by the year a course is first taught, not by the year it is first examined. That is the right organizing principle for a school planning its timetable. It is the wrong one for a parent asking whether a change reaches their child, because a family thinks in terms of the exam their child will sit.
Converting between the two is the whole task, and it is simpler than it looks. Find the month your child began the Diploma. A student who started in August 2025 is in the first cohort for the new Extended Essay and the new Psychology, and sits both in May 2027. A student who started in August 2026 takes the new History and sits it in May 2028.
That single fact answers most of what a family needs. The rest of this guide sets out what is in each wave and what the Extended Essay redesign did. It also covers what is not changing at all, and why so much of what a parent finds online describes courses that no longer exist.
Harland teaches IB students across the Diploma, and the Extended Essay is one of the pieces of work families most often bring to us. Since the new guide took effect, the pattern has been consistent enough to name.
A student arrives with a plan built from the outgoing course. They have budgeted effort for presentation and formatting, which used to carry four marks of its own and now carries none separately. They are preparing three staged reflections for a form that has been replaced by one statement. They have read a preparation site, or inherited advice from a sibling two years ahead, and neither has caught up.
The correction is not difficult once the student sees the mark table. What is difficult is knowing to look. A guide that changed in February 2025 does not announce itself to a student in Grade 12, and a school's own materials are not always rewritten in the first year. Families closest to the change are often the last to hear that anything moved, because the change arrived quietly and the internet kept describing the old version.
Every figure below comes from the IB's own materials: its published curriculum-update index, its subject briefs, and the subject guides themselves. Where the IB has not published something, this guide says so rather than filling the gap.
The IB's own index sorts these by the year a course is first taught. Sorted below by first assessment instead, with the cohort each wave reaches. Find the August your child began or will begin the Diploma, and read across.
The clearest way to see what a redesign does is to watch the marks move. The essay lost four marks in total, one criterion entirely, and shifted its center of gravity. Both bars are drawn to the same scale, so the shorter one is the new guide's smaller total of 30 marks against the outgoing 34.
Three changes in that table are worth reading together, because they point the same way.
Presentation disappeared as a criterion. In the outgoing essay a student could bank four marks by being tidy: consistent citations, a contents page, a clean layout. Those conventions still matter and are now folded into the opening criterion, but they no longer carry a prize of their own. Four marks that rewarded diligence have been redistributed to marks that reward thinking.
The twelve-mark Critical thinking criterion split, and the larger half went to evaluation. Discussion and evaluation now carries eight of thirty marks, the single heaviest criterion, and its ladder runs from stated to described to explained. The top band requires a student to explain the strengths and limitations of their own findings. A student who lists limitations in a closing paragraph, which is what most students do, sits below the top band by construction.
Reflection shrank and simplified. Six marks became four, and the three-part Reflections on Planning and Progress Form became the Reflection and Progress Form carrying a single statement of no more than 500 words. Criterion E is applied to that statement alone. Three supervision sessions remain, the last of them the viva voce.
Taken together, the redesign moves credit away from process narration and toward judgment about the work. That reading is ours rather than the IB's. The IB's own published rationale is narrower, stating that the criteria were redesigned to assess student performance more reliably and consistently than their predecessors did. The mark allocations support the wider reading, and a family can test it against the guide.
Two things did not change, and both matter. The essay is still 4,000 words, and the guide's rule on exceeding that limit is blunt: examiners are instructed not to read or assess material beyond the limit. A student whose evaluation sits in the last 300 words of a 4,300-word essay loses the marks that evaluation would have earned, and evaluation is now the heaviest criterion.
The World Studies essay has been replaced by two named pathways, subject-focused and interdisciplinary, the second integrating the lenses of two Diploma subjects. On which subject to choose, the guide is direct. No particular background is formally required, but it strongly recommends that students research in a subject they are currently studying in the Diploma, so they bring the subject knowledge the task needs. Our full guide to the Extended Essay works through the criteria in detail.
Psychology sits in the same 2027 wave as the Extended Essay, and its change is the more fundamental of the two. The course is restructured around three approaches, biological, cognitive, and sociocultural, plus research methodology, framed by six concepts and four contexts, with health and well-being replacing what used to be abnormal psychology. At SL the two papers carry 35 percent each and the internal assessment 30. At HL the papers carry 25 percent each, a third paper on the interpretation and analysis of research data carries 30, and the internal assessment 20.
The internal assessment is where the course changed character. Students used to run a small experiment, a replication of a published study, and write it up. They now design one. The task is a research proposal investigating a population of interest using one of the research methods practised in class, and SL and HL write the same task against the same criteria out of 24 marks.
A student who was told by an older sibling to think about participants and consent forms is preparing for a task that no longer exists in that form. The IB does not state a word limit for the proposal on its public pages, and figures circulating online are not the IB's, so this guide does not print one.
History is first taught from August 2026 and first assessed in May 2028, which makes it the change for students starting the Diploma now, not finishing it. The course is organized around four concepts: cause and consequence, continuity and change, perspectives, and significance. The familiar structures are renamed and reshaped. Prescribed subjects become paired case studies built around source skills, world history topics become global themes, and depth studies become regional in-depth topics for HL students, who continue to sit a regional third paper. Assessment weightings shift too, and the internal assessment's reflection section is removed.
A caution on History specifically. It is the most written-about of these redesigns, and much of that writing paraphrases instead of quoting. Several widely repeated descriptions use terminology the IB does not use. The terms above are the IB's own, taken from its History updates page and subject brief.
A redesign of one part of the Diploma tells a family nothing about the rest. Three things a parent might reasonably assume have changed, and have not.
A family checking any of this will meet a specific hazard, and it is worth naming because it will affect what they find rather than only what we found.
Preparation sites dominate these search results, and many describe syllabuses that have been retired. Pages updated this year still describe the Extended Essay as a 34-mark essay with a three-part reflection form. Pages about IB Psychology still describe the experimental-study internal assessment. The recency of a page tells a reader nothing about the currency of the syllabus it describes, because the page was refreshed without being rechecked.
Nor does agreement help. Sources of this kind copy one another, so five pages saying the same wrong thing is one error repeated five times, not five confirmations. The test that works is different: does the claim appear in a document the IB published, and does that document name the first assessment year it applies to?
A live example is worth more than the principle. Several preparation sites currently describe changes to IB Biology for 2028, including a new data booklet. Those claims do not appear on the IB's curriculum-update index, which lists History alone in the 2028 band. That does not make them false, since the IB publishes some material through channels a parent cannot see. It does mean a family should not plan around them, and should ask the school's IB coordinator instead.
The rule we followed in writing this guide is the one we would suggest to any family. Every number here traces to a document the IB published. Where a figure exists only on third-party pages, this guide either attributes it or leaves it out.
The situations we hear most often from IB families, with the first thing to check in each. They are starting points for a conversation with the school's IB coordinator, not recommendations.
The cohort table is the IB's own index, reordered by first assessment. Every subject, group, and date in it comes from the IB's curriculum-update pages or the subject briefs.
The Extended Essay criteria and marks, both guides, come from the IB's published criteria and the guide itself. The 4,000-word rule and the instruction to examiners are the guide's own wording.
The Psychology structure and weightings come from the IB's Psychology guide and its update page. The History terminology is the IB's, not a paraphrase of it.
The IB does not publish a per-subject last examination under an outgoing guide, so this guide names none. Families needing that date should ask their IB coordinator.
The word limit for the new Psychology internal assessment is not on the IB's public pages. Figures circulate online. None is quoted here.
The reading that the Extended Essay redesign moves credit from compliance toward judgment is ours. The IB's published rationale is narrower, and we say so where the reading appears.
Harland is a 1-on-1 tutoring academy in Taipei. We support IB students through the Extended Essay, internal assessments, and subject work, so we have a commercial interest in families understanding what these assessments now ask. We are not an IB World School, we do not deliver the Diploma, and nothing here is an official interpretation. The IB's guides are the authority, and where this guide and a guide disagree, the guide is right.
That position is also what makes the piece possible. We have no course materials to defend and no reason to describe the outgoing essay as still current. A school rewriting a handbook has more work to do than we do, and a preparation site with a page ranking for the old criteria has a reason to leave it alone.
What we do have is students sitting these assessments now, which is how we noticed the gap between what families believe and what the guides say. If a fact here is wrong or a date has moved, tell us and we will correct it. This guide is updated as the IB publishes.
Harland teaches one student at a time, in Taipei and online, across the IB Diploma Programme. Our pedagogy is content-based learning. For a student inside a redesigned course, the practical value is straightforward: the work is anchored to the current criteria rather than to what worked two years ago.
Our Student Coordinator speaks with IB families about where a student sits against the criteria they will be marked on. Tell us the year your child began the Diploma and which subjects they are taking.
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