Hack IB

The beginning of a TOK essay can seem like the biggest hurdle. You might not even have a prescribed title yet, or you’ve chosen one that you don’t understand! Believe me, every TOK student starts out this way, but once you follow the steps to plan out what you can write, the whole task becomes much easier. I will share with you a simple scaffold and guide you through it. With this plan, you will be able to communicate your ideas coherently and thoughtfully, to get that A in TOK we all dream about!

Before you write anything, plan!

Ahhh, you thought we were going to jump write in to writing that introduction! A common mistake students make is that they are so excited to write (or to the contrary, just want to get it over with) that they just start babbling out everything they know about TOK right away. But the right way to write a TOK essay is to plan. Here’s how we do it.

First, let’s take a look at the prescribed title. Have you chosen one yet? For May 2023 titles, have a read of this article for ideas and inspiration if you haven’t chosen one yet.

For your chosen prescribed title, we need to first identify four important elements:

1. Interpreting the title and key concept
2. What your stance needs to be
3. The Areas of Knowledge (AOK) you need to discuss
4. Good examples that support 1-3.

The Key Concept

Evidence	Certainty	Truth
Interpretation	Power	Justification
Explanation	Objectivity	Perspective
Culture	Values	Responsibility

In my deconstruction of the May 2023 titles, you will see that I have highlighted the key concept in each prompt. In the TOK Guide, the IB prescribes the above 12 concepts which should serve as the starting point for your TOK essay.

All good TOK essays should start by defining the key concept of the prescribed title. Let’s take the following prescribed title as an example (this is from a past TOK essay).

Is there solid justification for regarding knowledge in the natural sciences more highly than knowledge in another area of knowledge? Discuss with reference to the natural sciences and one other area of knowledge.

Right away, we can see that the key concept in this prescribed title is justification. From your understanding of TOK, what do you think justification means? Perhaps, it can be mean “a firm and widely accepted conviction that a particular perspective could be substantiated with evidence”. Okay, that might sound like a big leap. Don’t worry, your definitions can continue to evolve as you find examples for your TOK essay.

Interpreting the prompt

Okay, so we have some idea of what the prompt is about. A good exercise to interpret the prompt is to try and say it in your own words. How would you explain this question to your parents, or your friends that don’t study the IB? The process to try and un-TOK the prompt will help you make sense of what the prescribed title is asking you.

With the example prescribed title we are using, I had a crack and came up with “should we take some knowledge to be important than others? why or why not?” You see that I have simplified the prompt and made it less verbose. Of course, in your final essay, you will need to use the language of the prescribed title, but for now, this helps us wrap our head around it!

Stance

This is a bit more straight forward. It is essentially saying, what is the prescribed title asking us to do? For the one we are using, it is asking “Is there solid justification … ?” So clearly, at the end of the essay you should be able to come up with a yes, or a no answer. For other prompts, it may ask you “to what extent … ?” and you would respond with the appropriate extent. Simple! Basically, read your prescribed title carefully, and check that you answered the question!

That said though, just because it is a yes or no question, doesn’t mean you have to necessarily give a complete yes or no answer. As you may have learned in TOK, the answer is always ‘it depends’. By adding nuance to your answer, whether it be that you agree or disagree with the prescribed title, you show to the examiners that while you believe that “there is solid justification” or “there isn’t solid justification”, you can also recognise the other side’s point of view, and how that can be true at the same time. This is especially important when you are comparing Areas of Knowledge, because while it might be true for say the Natural Sciences, it could be the opposite for the Arts, for example.

For our practice prescribed title, I’m going with my gut and I’m going to start by saying that I think there is solid justification that some knowledge can be regarded more highly than others. That is just my gut feeling. Don’t worry, we will either solidify our stance, or change it as we go along with planning and writing the essay.

Areas of Knowledge

This smoothly transitions to our next step, identifying the areas of knowledge. in our prescribed title, it already gives us the Natural Sciences as a starting point. Some prescribed titles give you both Areas of Knowledge you need to sue and some give you free reign to choose them. If they are chosen for you, that’s great! You can move on to choosing your examples. Remember that the goal of the IB in giving you two AOKs to discuss is so you can compare and contrast. So obviously, when we are choosing our own AOKs, we need to keep this in mind.

If you have one other AOK to choose, like our practice prescribed title, then we should think about what would promote good contrast between the AOK that is given to us. In the prescribed title, it asks us to consider the Natural Sciences and wants us to focus on if knowledge in the Natural Sciences can be regarded more highly than other AOKs. What other AOKs come to mind when you think about Natural Sciences as the ‘king’ of knowledge? Perhaps, the Human Sciences or History? If you haven’t done TOK, you might assume that Natural Sciences must be the most awesome of them all, and these other AOKs are clearly inferior because they are unreliable and prone to bias. Alright, that’s great! We identified something that we instinctively believe would set the two AOKs apart. I’m going to choose Human Sciences, because I think it is interesting how sometimes we think that Natural Sciences like Physics and Chemistry is super reliable and true, but we often criticise the Human Sciences for being unreliable, like how economists famously predict recessions that don’t happen.

Choosing Examples

The examples are where we tie everything together. Remember our key concept: where we defined what we are looking for in our examples, our stance: which is going to inform the arguments we make with the examples, and finally, our AOKs: which will narrow down the examples we choose.

The goldilocks, perfect number of examples for a TOK essay should be 4. 4 examples allow you to have 2 each for each AOK in your prescribed title. One should be agreeing with your stance, and the other providing an alternative perspective, or contrasting viewpoint that challenges your stance. The IB loves it when you poke flaws at your own arguments and then back it up with evidence, but you will make your own stance stronger because you will then refute those flaws or maybe come up with a more nuanced stance.

Oh and a side note: a good way to find examples is to get them from your personal lives. What have you been learning at school, doing for CAS, or outside of school? Personal examples tends to be great for TOK essays, because guess what? The TOK essay is all about you. I recommend that at least 1 and preferably 2 of your examples are personal examples and not ones you found on the internet. This will make sure that the essay is unique to you and the examiners can really see that you have understood how TOK affects you!

For our practice prescribed title, I’ve set up my stance and AOKs in this table.

	AOK Natural Sciences	AOK Human Sciences
Yes, there is solid justification	Chemistry IA on calorimetry of different alcohols	Utility maximisation and bounded rationality theory
No, there isn’t!	Arrhenius, Lewis and Bronsted Lowry Acid Base Theories	Neoclassical and Keynesian Macroeconomic theory

This process might take you a bit of time, but let’s deconstruct what I did here.

I prefer starting my search for examples by stances. So I needed one example in the Natural Sciences and one in the Human Sciences that show how some knowledge is more important than others.

Based on my gut feeling, I think that Natural Sciences would be more reliable than Human Sciences because while they both share the same scientific method to produce knowledge, I feel that doing experiments with natural sciences can produce more reliable results than with people. Ahh, experiments! Now what experiments could I use to prove this point? I did an experiment in Chemistry where I burned some alcohols and found their energy content. Even though I had lots of errors, I remember I could compare with literature values so I knew what to expect and I think that makes Natural Sciences have quite reliable knowledge when you can easily check if you got the ‘right’ results.

So what can be contrasted with the Natural Sciences and show that Human Sciences have less reliable knowledge? In my Economics class, I learned about utility maximisation and bounded rationality. That is, economists first assumed that we would always get the most value out of all the decisions we make, but we later found out that, actually, we can be influenced by so many things psychologically that make us make worse decisions. So actually, so many economic theories rely on people making the ‘best’ choice that it seems unreliable in the real world because we don’t actually make such rational decisions all the time.

Now I have to find two examples that challenge what I just did. Maybe we shouldn’t believe that some knowledge is better than others. So I thought about what makes the two AOKs so similar that we shouldn’t think one is better than the other. That brings me to the scientific method. I know that both Natural Sciences and Human Sciences both use the scientific method, because they are both, well, science! So they follow the same steps to keep improving on existing knowledge and sometimes, come up with new theories that superceded past ones. Again in my chemistry class, we learned about the different Acids and Base theories and how we started from just saying “acids make hydrogen gas” to “acids can be anything that accepts a pair of electrons”! Similarly, economic theories can over time and we can see that in the macroeconomics study of Neo-classical vs Keynesian theories. So it seems that both AOKs have ways to evolve their knowledge so that it keeps being reliable.

Alright! Are you overwhelmed yet? This might sound super difficult to do right now and it might seem very intimidating. But from outlining my thought process, I just hope you can take away three key things as you search for examples:

1) Trust your gut!

Don’t be afraid to just come up with a preliminary answer to your prescribed title right away. Use that stance to come up with your first two examples. Then, challenge your own stance! Poke holes in your answers. In doing so, you should come up with another two examples that will make you question your original answer. Now, you have to decide, was my gut feeling correct? Or is there a better answer here in my examples?

2) Examples come from within

Let your mind guide you to your examples. The truth is, you shouldn’t need to trawl through the 100th page of google to find that perfect example. The best way to not get an overused example is by coming up with your own! You have learned so much in your two years of IB. You should have plenty of experiences just learning in class that you can talk about. Yes, your IA ideas might be the same as someone else’s, but your experiences will be different! Looking to your IAs for examples can be one of the best ways to come up with original TOK essay ideas.

3) Be open-minded

As you find examples, you may find that actually, your definition of the key concept doesn’t really fit, or your stance wasn’t that well supported. Good thing is, because you are just planning right now, you can change it! Don’t be afraid to flip your side based on the examples you find.

Helpful document

To help you on your way to planning out your TOK essay, here is a planning scaffold that you can use, which basically provides the structure in the same way as this article.

Check out the planning document here!

Next Steps

You are now ready to begin writing! You may wish to refine your ideas and examples, revise your definitions and your stance.