To print: the exhibition guide on two pages · the one-page checklist · the parts, in order

The task

You choose one of the 35 IA prompts and three objects that show how that prompt plays out in the world. For each object you write a commentary that names the object and its specific real-world context, explains how it links to the prompt, and justifies why this object belongs in the exhibition. Your file contains a title (the prompt, word for word), an image of each object, the three commentaries (950 words in total, references not counted) and your references.¹

Some rules from the guide are easy to miss:

• The prompt must be copied exactly. A reworded prompt is marked against the original, and anything that drifts from the original costs relevance. An exhibition that uses no listed prompt scores 0.
• Objects may be physical or digital (a tweet, a database entry, a scanned letter). They may be things you made yourself, such as a painting from your art course or your own Extended Essay, but they must already exist. You cannot make an object for the exhibition.
• Two students in the same class may use the same prompt, but not the same object.
• The examiner stops reading at word 951. Two objects instead of three caps the mark at 6.

Choosing the prompt

All 35 prompts are knowledge questions, and they are not equally easy to answer. Pick a prompt that you can turn into a range of possible answers (see “Design the exhibition as one argument” below). Before you commit, write down three different answers the prompt allows. For Is bias inevitable in the production of knowledge? those might be yes, and it does damage; yes, but it can be corrected; no, here is a method that removes it. If you can only think of one answer, all three of your objects will make the same point.

Be sure you understand what the prompt is actually asking. Values in the prompts means moral values, what we hold to be right and important, not what something is worth. A prompt about improvement (How can we know that current knowledge is an improvement upon past knowledge?) is not answered by showing that microscopes got better; it asks how we know that the new knowledge is better. Underline the key term in the prompt and say in one sentence what it means. Then check that each object raises that question.

The guide recommends basing the exhibition on one of the TOK themes (the core theme, knowledge and the knower, or an optional theme such as knowledge and technology). This narrows your search. It is a recommendation, not a rule.

Choosing the objects

Start early. Keep a list of possible objects and possible prompts from the first term on, and add to it whenever a lesson or your own life produces something. John Sprague’s advice for the whole task is “Curate your ideas, don’t stream them.”² Collect more objects than you need, for more than one prompt, and decide late. Then test each candidate.

It must be one specific object, not a type of object. The guide’s own example: a photograph of your baby brother has a specific real-world context; an image of “a baby” from a web search does not.³ “A laptop,” “the radio” or a screenshot of a search engine are types. Nobody wants to visit an exhibition of them.

It should be something you own, or can show you have dealt with. An exhibition built from stock photos, shop images or publishers’ covers reads as an essay wearing three borrowed pictures, however well it is written, and moderators mark it down. Strong objects are owned and placed in a context: a school-issue book with your name in it, your own class timetable, a product you use, tied to the law that regulates it, a chat screenshot used with permission. Provenance rule: photograph the object yourself and write one sentence that says whose it is, where and when it came into your life, and why.

The swap test. Replace your object, in your head, with another member of its category: another dictionary, another banknote, another textbook. If your commentary still works, you are not writing about the object. You are writing about an abstraction (“language,” “money,” “science”), and the object is a decoration. Rewrite the commentary around what only this object has: its date, its owner, its errors, its numbers. Or change the object.

No metaphors. An object is not a symbol for an idea. A face mask used to stand for “hidden values” is a metaphor; the mask itself is never discussed as a product of knowledge. Good objects are things people made while knowing, or trying to know, something: a map, a lab notebook, a court ruling, a forecast, a museum label. A blank sheet of paper standing for “open-mindedness” is a symbol; your own blank canvas, entered in a competition, is an object. The companions disagree about natural things: an iceberg on its own is not a product of knowledge, but the photograph of it on a newspaper’s front page is. Living beings are best avoided; a photograph of a person is an object, the person is not.⁴ As Henly and Sprague put it: “The objects are not the TOK, the prompts are.”

Three objects, three jobs. The rubric’s top band asks for “the particular contribution that each individual object makes.” If two of your three objects show the same thing, that descriptor is capped, however well each commentary is written.

Design the exhibition as one argument

What lifts an exhibition into the top band is less how personal the objects are than how the three work together. Four moves help.

1. Turn the prompt into a range of possible answers and give each object a different place in it. For Can new knowledge change established values or beliefs?: one object where new knowledge changed values completely, one where it changed them partially, one where it changed almost nothing. For Are some types of knowledge less open to interpretation than others?: an artwork at maximal interpretation, a mathematical identity at minimal interpretation, a table of statistics somewhere in the middle. Or show three different mechanisms by which the prompt’s process works.
2. Connect the objects on the page. One or two sentences per commentary that say what this object does that the others do not: “Unlike my first object, where the new knowledge changed nothing, this one shows…”
3. End every commentary with an answer to the prompt in the prompt’s own words. Not “this shows that values matter,” but “one way values affect the production of knowledge is by forcing a method to be replaced, as this ban did.” A theme is not a verdict.
4. Cite evidence, where possible taken from the object itself. If the object is a statistics table, quote its figures, then ask what its categories assume and who decided them.

A note on point 2: the IB’s examiners say that comparing objects is not required, and that an exhibition can discuss each object on its own.⁵ Sprague adds that you need no introduction and no conclusion; the Oxford companion suggests a one- or two-sentence opening that says what the three objects show together. Both are allowed. But comparing is the cheapest way to show “the particular contribution that each individual object makes.”

Writing each commentary

About 300 words per object. A shape that works:

1. Context first, briefly. Two or three sentences: what the object is, whose, when, where. Only what the prompt needs. Your discussion of the prompt must be longer than your description of the object, however fascinating its history.
2. The knowledge issue. What tension or problem does this object raise for this prompt? One sentence, as precise as you can make it.
3. The mechanism. How exactly does the object show it? “This shows that context shapes knowledge” is an assertion. How does context shape it here, through what process, and with what evidence? A link explained as a mechanism is worth far more than a link asserted.
4. One verifiable fact doing work. A date, a figure, a ruling, a quotation, cited. At least one per object.
5. The other side, if you have room. Who would read this object differently? A single sentence that limits your claim makes it stronger.
6. The verdict, in the prompt’s words, and how this object’s answer differs from the other two.

The colour test. Print your draft and mark it in three colours: description of the object in red, its context in blue, discussion of the prompt in green. The page should be mostly green.⁶

Keep the prompt’s key term in the same sense throughout. If “context” means the messenger in the first commentary, the reader’s upbringing in the second and the medium in the third, you have three unconnected anecdotes, not an answer. And use TOK vocabulary only where it does work: naming “coherence and correspondence theories of truth” without explaining or applying them earns nothing.

Evidence and references

Evidence is the hardest test in the rubric, and the one most often failed.

• Evidence floor: at least one checkable, cited fact per object that your argument needs.
• Check every factual claim. A single wrong fact in the case that carries your argument (a scientific model described backwards, a historical figure credited with a decision they never made) can cost a band.
• Not acceptable as references: “(Wikipedia)” on its own; a dictionary definition doing the work of an argument; a stock-photo URL given as an object’s “source”; part of a shopping page.
• A bibliography is required. An exhibition with good objects and no references cannot be “well-supported by appropriate evidence.”
• Clean your links. Remove tracking tags such as ?utm_source=chatgpt.com. See “Using AI tools” in The Two Assessments.
• If an image is your own work or your own photograph, say so in the caption.

Word count and finish

Use the words. Three objects cannot be “well-explained” in 650 words, and anything over 950 is not read. Aim for 850 to 950. Proofread the final file: no draft notes, comments or highlighting left on the page. None of this is marked directly; all of it weakens the overall impression, and at the top the overall impression is the mark.

Common faults

The subtlest fault is the last step: a fine, specific object whose commentary discusses something next to the issue it raises instead of the issue itself. Before you finish, ask of each object: what is the core problem this object raises for this prompt, and is that what my commentary discusses?