Changes to May 2021 IB Exams (English Edition)

All of the following information is based on the following IB pdf, outlining the changes to the May 2021 examination session due to COVID disruption. This blog post will be updated when the IB releases more information. 

With the many months of stagnated learning due to moving teaching online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the IB decided to change up the May 2021 examination session. In most subjects, the IB has removed or amended parts of the final exams in order to reduce the amount of content that students will need to get through. What does this mean for you as a student? Let’s take a look at what changes the IB has made to IB English! 

Language A: Literature

SL: Paper Two – Removed

HL: Paper Two – Removed

Language A: Language and Literature 

SL: Paper Two – Removed

HL: Paper Two – Removed

So, the IB has removed paper 2 for everyone studying English as a Language A! Is this good? Bad? Well, we at Lanterna think it has pros and cons to you as a student. 

Suppose you are a SL Language and Literature student. Well, now essentially the entire literary aspect of your course has been wiped out. Although you’ll still need to discuss one literary and one non-literary work in your internal assessment, there’s a lot of content that has just been removed from your syllabus! 

However, despite the good news of having less content that you will be tested on, there is a drawback to what the IB has decided. Naturally, as a result of one assessment component being removed, the other assessments will become relatively more important. The IB has not yet released what the new weighting for the course will be, but it is only logical that both the Paper 1 and the IA are now more important than they were before! So, if Paper 1 wasn’t your strong suit, you may have actually been hurt by this move…

Unfortunately the IB hasn’t provided more information than this, so we’ll keep you updated whenever we find out more!