Business Management subject report · May 2018

May 2018 extended essay reports Page 1 Business Management Overall grade boundaries Grade: E D C B A Mark range: 0-6 7-13 14-20 21-26 27-34 The range and suitability of the work submitted A small number of candidates wrote excellent EEs with university -level secondary sources, such as academic articles from peer -reviewed journals; these A -grade candidates and their supervisors have fully understood the fact that the EE is a scholarly piece of work. For the highest marks , examiners were not looking for perfection: the candidate may have missed out on some points on some of the criteria, for example with a RPPF more descriptive (of the meetings with the supervisor) than evaluative (of the candidate’s own research process), but the highest marks were typically rewarded the candidates who: • had carried out substantial academic research, as showed by their bibliography (see criteria A, B, C) • displayed a high level of both data analysis and discussion of their findings (see criterion C). Those who performed satisfactorily usually conducted did some interesting research, but not always with the methodology appropriate for an EE. The work often read like an IA task (with primary research and recommendations for the bus iness owner/manager) and/or the bibliography was short (typically: just the class textbook and some websites), possibly more journalistic than academic. In many cases, examiners felt that the candidates had not been properly counselled, especially when the supervisor seemed to encourage the use of primary research and recommendations at the end of the work, as in the IA task . As in previous