Extended Essay Supervision and Help

"To what extent did social media affect the 2019 protests" is not a research question, it is a topic. Four thousand words is much less room than it sounds, and a broad question produces an essay that summarises rather than argues. The examiner sees a competent survey of a subject and marks it in the middle.

Narrow is safer than it feels. An essay that answers a small question thoroughly outscores one that gestures at a large question, every time. The test is whether you can state, in one sentence, what evidence would change your answer. If you cannot, the question is still too broad.

The EE has no weekly homework attached to it, which means nothing forces progress. It sits behind six subjects, the IAs, TOK and CAS, and it loses that competition every week until it becomes an emergency.

The structural fix is to attach the EE to dates that are not the final deadline: question approved, sources gathered, first reflection session, half draft, full draft. Your school will set some of these. Set the rest yourself and treat them as real.

Pick the subject where you can find evidence, not the one you like most. An English EE needs texts you can analyse closely. A history EE needs sources you can actually reach, and Hong Kong students frequently choose topics whose archives are in another country. A science EE needs an experiment you can run with school equipment, which is the same constraint as the Internal Assessment and catches students out for the same reason.

One rule with no exceptions: your EE subject should be one you are taking, and ideally at HL. Writing an EE in a subject you do not study means learning the discipline's conventions and doing the research at the same time.

The EE has been revised. The updated guide was released in 2025 for first assessment in the May 2027 session, so current Year 12 students should check with their coordinator which guide applies to their cohort.

What changes in the new version:

• Two pathways. A subject-focused essay within one DP subject, or an interdisciplinary essay drawing on two. The second is genuinely new and genuinely harder, because it has to satisfy two disciplines' standards of evidence.
• No abstract. The introduction carries that work instead.
• Appendices are not guaranteed to be read. Anything an examiner needs belongs in the body.
• Redesigned criteria, covering the same territory with clearer wording.

Our advice on the interdisciplinary pathway is to take it only if the question genuinely requires two subjects. Choosing it to look ambitious puts a student in a harder assessment for no gain.

Your school supervisor owns the formal process, including the reflection sessions, and we work alongside that rather than around it. We help pressure-test the question before it is committed to, plan the research, structure the argument, and read drafts critically.

We do not write any part of an EE. The reflection sessions exist partly to verify authorship, and supervisors are good at noticing when an essay does not sound like the student sitting in front of them.