Parent’s information day last Friday at TIS hosted record numbers of parents and guardians who took time out of their busy schedules to come into school and find out more about the completion of MYP, its assessments and requirements and the IB MYP Certificate.

Parents were given a chance to try the MYP onscreen assessments and to have one-to-one chats with subject teachers, and the college guidance teams.

IB MYP gives schools the choice to decide to offer the examinations leading the IB MYP Certificate, or to go through to the IB DP on continuous assessment. As a consequence of that, schools and, in this case, TIS also gives students the chance to decide to take examinations leading to the IB MYP Certificate or to just continue to the IB DP on continuous assessment. The decision to opt-in or not must be made known to the MYP Coordinator by 11 October, 2019.

Opting in implies that students agree to be entered for a minimum of six subjects. At TIS, they are Language and Literature, one of French or Spanish, one of History or Geography, one of Biology, Chemistry or Physics (we advise that students who will be considering a path in medical sciences in universities in Ghana, take all three sciences i.e. two elective subjects comprising the other two sciences), one of Standard or Extended Mathematics, one of Visual Arts, Music, Drama, Product Design, Digital Design or Personal and Health Education (PHE). There is also an Interdisciplinary (ID) assessment and a Personal Project to be prepared. There is a maximum of 8 subject which can be taken to IB MYP Certification.

The assessments:

Once the onscreen assessments have been taken and the e-portfolios have been submitted, IB MYP candidates must achieve a minimum of an IB-validated grade of 3 in each of the 6 subjects of choice. Candidates must complete the ID assessment, submit a completed Personal Project both with a minimum IB-validated grade of 3 to achieve the IB MYP certificate. In addition, a candidate must have achieved a minimum total of 28 points (the maximum being 49 points) overall to be certified. Students who attain grade 3 in all the 7 components will find their IB MYP Certificate compromised. If this did happen, they would be automatically awarded IB MYP course results. Course results individually show a student’s achievement in the courses they have taken at MYP5. Course results will include the subjects that did not contribute to the awarding of the IB MYP Certificate. It must be noted that students who take more than one subject from the same group (e.g. the Sciences) will have their best grade from Biology, Chemistry or Physics taken to contribute to their compulsory 6 subjects when the IB MYP Certificate is considered.

It is worth noting that if students opt out of the IB MYP certificate, they must still complete the TIS onscreen assessments, e-portfolios, personal project and ID assessment in order to be awarded the TIS Certificate. Irrespective of whether students opt in or out of taking the IB MYP certificate, they will be taught in the same classes because the level of expectation for success is considered the same for both options.

Last, but of equal importance, academic honesty as an IB MYP requirement is to be observed at all times. Failure to observe this requirement would risk the loss of the IB MYP Certificate entirely.

Examples of academic honesty infringements are:

• Plagiarism – Appropriating someone else’s work and parading it as one’s own        
• Exam misconduct – Possessing unauthorized materials or misbehavior during exams (e.g. creating a deliberate disturbance)
• Collusion – Allowing and knowing that one’s work is being copied
• Duplication – Submitting the same work twice for different components
• Academic Infringement – Producing inaccurate citations or referencing

MYP Coordinator