The Excruciating EE

As I mentioned, I have finished my EE. I handed it in this morning. Can't say I was ecstatic - more of a huge relief, slightly outweighed by the rest of the homework I have due - TOK, WL, Bio pracs, D&T folio, Spanish oral...it never stops.

Something my friend (Miss SM) said to me last night in an email put the EE in perspective for me. The EE is a 4000 word research essay and a compulsory component of the IB. We put in huge amounts of time and effort to complete the essay - according to my IB coordinator and the IBO it should take 40 hours, and considering we've had at least 5 EE writing days, that's about 5 hours/day = 25 hours. Plus time spent with supervisors and working on drafts outside of this time...But it's more than 40 hours. It's countless days spent stressing, tired, and emotionally and intellectually drained. How much is this worth of our final mark? Logically, if proportional to the amount of time/effort spent on it, it would consist of a fair percentage of our overall mark. But the IBO doesn't work like that - in total, our EE mark counts for 1.5 marks out of 45 (though as my IB coordinator keeps reminding us, this, combined with 1.5 marks for TOK, can yield up to 5 ENTER marks!). That's 3 1/3% of our final mark!! (and yes, I did only just figure that out). All those long nights...all those drafts...all those trees...all that angst and frustration...It's such a major thing and such a little mark (let's remember my IB coordinator!) I want some acknowledgement of my effort, dammit!! It's so undermining - it's like, what did I do this for?! But I'm so over it already. No more footnoting! No more "don't acknowledge like this!" (my IB supervisor). No more long nights! No more worrying about whether the essay is justified!

Speaking of the above, the EE really brings out the nerdy side of any IB student. We become so pedantic (thank you, IB supervisor, for making us worry about whether our pages numbers are the same font as our essay. And thank you, examiner's report, for pointing out that in my footnotes I should use p. not pg when denoting page.) I reprinted three copies of my whole essay (all 17 pages - relatively short, because it's an English essay, and thus does not need appendices etc. My friend who did her essay in Physics had a 53 page essay!) this morning because I hadn't justified my margins. I didn't have to, but it was something I felt worried about. We actually care about our footnotes, and whether our abstract is double spaced. Even more sad but true: people actually care about their word count - if it's exactly 4000, or 3, 999 and their abstract is 299. (Funnily enough, my abstract and my essay were both 5 words under. NOT purposely!)

Apparently last night in the library was pretty hectic what with all the IB people printing to hand in today - people fighting over printers, people crying, people stealing library books and past EEs (every EE writing day there is always someone tries to take a book out of the library.) Would have been hilarious...I wasn't there though; too busy trying to print etc in house.

Now off for dinner (La Porchetta) and Pirates 3 with about 18 other girls! Should be awesome...celebrating my b'day, EE and any other excuse to go out!

x
Just a girl