The TOK/EE Matrix: How Your IB Core Points Are Awarded

Three points sit at the top of every IB score. Not from a subject. Not from an exam hall. They come from two pieces of work most students underestimate — Theory of Knowledge and the Extended Essay. The TOK/EE matrix is the small grid that turns those two grades into 0, 1, 2 or 3 bonus points. It is also the grid that can quietly end a diploma. This guide shows you the full matrix, explains every cell, and uses the IB's own May 2025 results to show what students actually score.

Quick answer: The TOK/EE matrix is the official IB grid that combines your Theory of Knowledge grade (A–E) with your Extended Essay grade (A–E) to award 0 to 3 bonus points. Those points are added to your six subject grades, which is how a maximum of 42 becomes the famous 45. Two As give you 3 points. An A and a B also give 3. A grade E in either TOK or the Extended Essay is a failing condition — you get no diploma, no matter how high your subject grades are. In May 2025, 12.2% of diploma students earned all 3 points and 17.8% earned none.

Let's break it down properly.

What is the TOK/EE matrix?

The TOK/EE matrix is a 5×5 table that converts your two core grades into diploma points. TOK stands for Theory of Knowledge, the IB's course about how we know what we know. EE stands for Extended Essay, the 4,000-word independent research project every diploma student writes. Neither is graded 1–7 like a subject. Both are graded on a letter scale from A (excellent) down to E (elementary).

Because letters can't simply be added to numbers, the IB uses a grid. You find your TOK letter along the top and your EE letter down the side. Where they meet is your core points score.

You'll see it written several ways — the TOK EE matrix, the EE/TOK matrix, the IB core points matrix, the bonus points grid. They all mean the same table.

Those points are called "bonus" points for a reason. Your six subjects give you up to 42 points — six subjects, 7 marks each. The core adds up to 3 more. That's the 45, and it's the last piece of how the IB points system works.

One important limit: bonus points can't rescue a failing total. You need 24 points to pass, and those 24 must come from your six subjects. The core points sit on top. If you finish on 23 subject points and earn 3 bonus points, you don't scrape a 26 and pass. You fail. This catches families out every single year, so it's worth saying twice.

The TOK/EE matrix in full

Here is the complete matrix. Find your Extended Essay grade on the left, then read across to your TOK grade.

The grid is symmetrical. TOK B with EE A gives 3 points, and so does TOK A with EE B. The IB doesn't weight one component above the other.

A few things jump out once you stare at it.

• Only three combinations give you 3 points: A/A, A/B and B/A.

• Six combinations give you 2 points, which is the most common outcome by a wide margin.

• Two Ds give you zero. So does a C paired with a D.

• Every cell in the E row and the E column is a fail. There are no exceptions.

How do you read the TOK/EE matrix quickly?

Add your two letters together as if A=4, B=3, C=2 and D=1, then use a simple rule: a total of 7 or 8 gives 3 points, 5 or 6 gives 2 points, 4 gives 1 point, and 2 or 3 gives 0. That shortcut matches the official grid in every non-failing cell, and it's much easier to remember in a stressful week.

Try it. EE B (3) plus TOK A (4) is 7, so 3 points. Correct. EE C (2) plus TOK D (1) is 3, so 0 points. Correct. EE D (1) plus TOK A (4) is 5, so 2 points. Correct again.

The shortcut is only a memory aid. Grade E always overrides it, and E always means fail.

Why is a grade E the only grade that should scare you?

A grade E in TOK or the Extended Essay is an automatic failing condition, which means the IB will not award you the diploma regardless of your subject points. This has been the rule since the May 2015 session. Before that, students with an E could still pass by reaching 28 points overall. That safety net is gone.

So an E is not "0 points and move on". It is the end of the diploma. A student with 42 subject points and an E in the Extended Essay receives Diploma Programme Course Results, not an IB Diploma.

The same applies if you fail to submit at all. A non-submission is treated exactly like an E. Miss the school's upload deadline for your TOK essay and the outcome is identical to writing a terrible one.

The good news is that E grades are rare. In May 2025, only 0.2% of TOK students and 0.7% of Extended Essay students were awarded an E. Put another way, 99.8% of TOK candidates and 99.3% of EE candidates clear the bar. An E is almost always a symptom of something else: an essay never really started, a supervisor never really consulted, or a deadline missed in the chaos of DP2.

If you want to protect against that, the fix is boring and effective. Set your own deadline three weeks before the school's. Book the reflection sessions early. Ask for help long before it's an emergency. Educifly's Extended Essay coaching is built around exactly this problem — it's an add-on programme, separate from regular subject tutoring, and it exists because most EE damage happens through drift, not through lack of ability.

What do real TOK/EE combinations look like?

The best way to understand the matrix is to walk through students you'd actually meet in a DP classroom.

Maya: EE A, TOK B → 3 points. She started her History EE in DP1, met her supervisor five times, and rewrote her research question twice. TOK was never her favourite, but a solid essay and a strong exhibition earned a B. Her six subjects gave her 38. Final score: 41.

Daniel: EE C, TOK C → 1 point. He wrote a competent Biology EE in the last six weeks, with a research question that was too broad to analyse properly. His TOK essay was descriptive rather than evaluative. Both landed mid-band. Subjects gave him 34. Final score: 35.

Priya: EE D, TOK D → 0 points. Both pieces were finished, both were submitted, both were rushed. She passes the diploma comfortably on 36 subject points. But two grades up — a C in each — would have been worth 1 point, and a B and a C would have been worth 2. Final score: 36.

Tom: EE E, TOK A → no diploma. His subject grades total 39. His TOK work was excellent. His Extended Essay was submitted three days late in a form his supervisor had never seen, and it earned an E. Tom receives course results and has to retake.

The gap between Maya and Priya is 3 points. In university admissions, 3 points is often the difference between an offer and a rejection. That's why the core deserves real planning time rather than the leftovers of your calendar.

How many students actually get 3 core points?

Only 12.2% of diploma students earned the full 3 core points in the May 2025 session, and the average across all diploma students was 1.5 points. The full distribution, taken from the IB's official final statistical bulletin for May 2025, looks like this.

Two takeaways matter here.

First, 2 points is the normal outcome. Nearly half of all diploma students land there. If you're aiming for a competitive university, 2 points is not an achievement — it's the baseline you're being compared against.

Second, 3 points is genuinely rare. Roughly one student in eight gets there. That's a smaller share than the 9.8% who scored 40+ overall would suggest is easy, and it tells you something useful: the core is where a lot of high-scoring students quietly leak points.

The mean has been stable at around 1.5 points for five years, so don't expect the IB to get generous. Plan for the grid you see.

How is your TOK grade actually built?

Your TOK grade comes from two assessed tasks: the TOK essay, worth two-thirds of the grade, and the TOK exhibition, worth one-third.

The TOK essay is a maximum of 1,600 words on one of six prescribed titles the IB publishes for each session. You don't choose your own question. It's marked externally by IB examiners out of 10. Examiners are instructed to stop reading at 1,600 words, so anything after that is invisible to your grade.

The TOK exhibition asks you to pick one of 35 prescribed prompts and connect it to three real-world objects. You write a commentary of no more than 950 words total across all three objects — roughly 300 words each. It's marked by your school out of 10 and then moderated by the IB.

Those two marks are combined using the 2:1 weighting, and the total is converted into a letter grade using boundaries the IB sets each session. Boundaries move slightly session to session, so treat any published figures as indicative rather than fixed.

Here's what most students get wrong. The TOK essay rewards evaluation, not description. Explaining what a knowledge question means will earn you a C. Weighing two genuinely competing answers, with real examples, and arriving at a defended position, is what moves you into A territory. If your essay has no counterargument, you have not written a TOK essay. Our TOK essay coaching spends most of its time on exactly this move.

How is your Extended Essay grade built?

For students sitting exams up to and including May 2026, the Extended Essay is marked out of 34 across five criteria, then converted to a letter grade.

Criterion C is worth 12 marks — more than a third of the whole essay. That single fact should shape how you write. An essay that describes a topic beautifully but never argues will cap out around a C. Description is cheap. Analysis is what the marks are for.

Indicative grade boundaries for the 34-mark scale run roughly A = 27–34, B = 21–26, C = 14–20, D = 7–13 and E = 0–6. The IB reviews these each session, so use them for planning, not for prediction.

Notice how little Presentation is worth: 4 marks. Students routinely spend a weekend perfecting their bibliography formatting and thirty minutes on their argument. That's the wrong trade. Get your referencing consistent, then put everything else into Criterion C. If you're still choosing what to write about, our guide to Extended Essay topics walks through what makes a question researchable rather than just interesting.

Does your EE subject group change your chances?

Yes — and by more than most students expect. The May 2025 statistical bulletin breaks Extended Essay results down by subject group, and the spread is real.

Sciences had the lowest A rate of any group at 8.9%, while The Arts had the highest at 14.5%. Individuals and Societies — the biggest group by far, with 44,528 essays — sat below average at 9.9%.

Read this carefully, though. It does not mean "write your EE in Visual Arts to get an A". Different groups attract different students and different kinds of question. A science EE usually needs original data collection, and experiments that don't work are hard to rescue into a strong argument. A history EE competes against 44,000 others, many of them written on the same handful of overdone topics.

The honest lesson is narrower: a science EE is not a safer bet just because you're good at science. If you pick Chemistry because it's your strongest subject, but your investigation depends on lab equipment your school doesn't have, you're taking on risk that a well-scoped Language A essay simply doesn't carry.

Across all groups, 41.4% of essays landed on a C and 17.9% on a D. That's nearly 60% of students in the two bands that contribute least to the matrix. The middle is crowded. Getting out of it is mostly about question design, and question design happens in DP1.

What changes for students sitting the EE in 2027?

The IB has published a new Extended Essay guide with first assessment in 2027, and it changes the shape of the task. If you're starting DP1 now, this is your version.

The headline changes:

• Two pathways. You can write a traditional subject-focused essay in one DP subject, or an interdisciplinary essay combining two DP subjects. Interdisciplinary essays must register under one of five prescribed frameworks: Power, equality, justice · Culture, identity, expression · Movement, time, space · Evidence, measurement, innovation · Sustainability, development, change.

• New criteria. The five criteria are now A Framework for the essay, B Knowledge and understanding, C Analysis and line of argument, D Discussion and evaluation, and E Reflection. Discussion and evaluation carries the heaviest weight of any single criterion.

• A single reflective statement. Instead of three separate written reflections, you write one statement of no more than 500 words on the reflection and progress form (RPF), after your final interview.

• Three mandatory reflection sessions with your supervisor, the third being the concluding interview or viva voce. Supervision is capped at three to five hours.

• Two subjects are excluded from the interdisciplinary pathway: Environmental Systems and Societies, and Literature and Performance. Both are already cross-disciplinary.

What does not change: the 4,000-word limit, the roughly 40 hours of student work, and the TOK/EE matrix itself. The guide confirms the EE "in combination with the grade for theory of knowledge (TOK), contributes up to three points to the total score for the IB diploma", and states plainly that a student "must achieve a D grade or higher for the extended essay to be awarded the diploma".

So the grid on this page still applies to the class of 2027. Only the route to your letter has changed.

Where do students lose core points?

Most lost core points trace back to five habits, and every one of them is fixable in DP1.

1. Starting the EE too late. The IB expects around 40 hours of work spread over months. Six weeks of panic produces a C at best, because there's no time to rewrite the research question.

2. A research question that can't be argued. "What is the history of penicillin?" has no debate in it. "To what extent did wartime funding, rather than scientific insight, determine the speed of penicillin's mass production?" does. The first caps you at a C. The second can reach an A.

3. Describing in the TOK essay instead of evaluating. No counterclaim, no A. Examiners want to see you take an opposing view seriously and then explain why you still disagree.

4. Treating reflections as paperwork. Criterion E is worth 6 of 34 marks in the current guide, and reflection is a full criterion in the 2027 guide. Vague reflections written the night before submission are visible from space.

5. Ignoring the word limits. Examiners stop reading at 4,000 words for the EE, 1,600 for the TOK essay and 950 for the exhibition commentary. Your best paragraph is worth nothing if it sits after the cut-off.

None of these require talent. They require a calendar.

How do you plan for 2 or 3 core points?

Work backwards from the matrix. To get 3 points you need at least an A and a B. To get 2 you need something like a B and a B, or an A and a C. That tells you where to spend your effort.

Here's a realistic timeline that produces those grades.

DP1, term 1: Choose your EE subject. Test three candidate research questions by trying to write a one-paragraph answer to each. If you can't argue with yourself, the question is wrong.

DP1, term 2: First reflection session. Lock the research question. Do the reading. Start the researcher's reflection space and write in it honestly — this is what makes the final reflection easy.

DP1, term 3 into summer: Write the full first draft. Yes, before DP2 starts. Students who enter DP2 with a complete draft are the ones who end up with As.

DP2, term 1: Second reflection session and one full rewrite focused entirely on analysis. Meanwhile the TOK exhibition is drafted and submitted.

DP2, term 2: Final submission and the viva voce. TOK essay drafted against the prescribed title, with a real counterclaim built in from the first outline.

If you want to see how core points change your total in practice, run a few scenarios through our free IB score calculator — it's the quickest way to show a student that 2 points is worth as much as a full grade jump in a subject.

And if the EE or TOK is already drifting, get eyes on it early. A single session with someone who has marked this work is usually worth more than another month of solo effort. You can book a free trial class and bring the draft you have, however rough.

Frequently asked questions

What is the TOK/EE matrix?

The TOK/EE matrix is the official IB grid that combines your Theory of Knowledge grade with your Extended Essay grade to award 0, 1, 2 or 3 bonus points toward your diploma total. Both components are graded A to E. The matrix decides how those two letters convert into points, and it also marks which combinations fail.

How many bonus points can you get from TOK and the EE?

A maximum of 3. Your six subjects provide up to 42 points, and the TOK/EE core adds up to 3 more, which is how the IB Diploma reaches a maximum of 45 points.

What TOK and EE grades give you 3 points?

Only three combinations award 3 points: A in both, an A in TOK with a B in the EE, or a B in TOK with an A in the EE. Everything else gives you 2 points or fewer.

What happens if you get an E in TOK or the Extended Essay?

A grade E in either component is a failing condition, so the IB Diploma is not awarded no matter how many subject points you earned. You receive Diploma Programme Course Results instead. This has applied since the May 2015 session; the older rule that let students pass with 28 points despite an E no longer exists.

Do bonus points count toward the 24 points needed to pass?

No. The 24-point minimum must come from your six subjects alone. Core points are added on top of a passing total, so 23 subject points plus 3 core points is still a fail.

What percentage of students get 3 core points?

12.2% of diploma students earned 3 core points in the May 2025 session. Another 43.8% earned 2 points, 25.2% earned 1 point and 17.8% earned none. The average was 1.5 core points, a figure that has barely moved since 2021.

Is TOK or the Extended Essay worth more in the matrix?

Neither. The matrix treats both equally, so an A in TOK with a B in the EE gives exactly the same 3 points as a B in TOK with an A in the EE. The grid is symmetrical.

How is the TOK grade calculated?

Your TOK grade combines two tasks: the 1,600-word TOK essay on a prescribed title, marked externally out of 10 and worth two-thirds, and the TOK exhibition of three objects with a 950-word commentary, marked internally out of 10 and moderated by the IB, worth one-third. The combined score is converted to a letter grade using session-specific boundaries.

What mark do you need for an A in the Extended Essay?

Under the current guide the EE is marked out of 34, and indicative boundaries put grade A at roughly 27 marks and above, with B around 21–26 and C around 14–20. Boundaries are reviewed each session, so treat these as planning figures rather than guarantees.

Which EE subject group has the best grades?

In May 2025, The Arts had the highest A rate at 14.5%, followed by Studies in Language and Literature at 14.3%. Sciences had the lowest at 8.9%. This reflects the kinds of questions each group attracts as much as the difficulty of the subjects, so choose the subject where you can build a genuinely arguable question.

Does the TOK/EE matrix change for the class of 2027?

No. The Extended Essay guide changes for first assessment in 2027 — new criteria, a new interdisciplinary pathway and a single 500-word reflective statement — but the matrix itself is unchanged. The EE still combines with TOK for up to 3 points, and a D or higher in the EE is still required for the diploma.

Can you retake TOK or the Extended Essay?

Yes. Students who fail the diploma can register for a retake session and resubmit the Extended Essay, usually with a revised or entirely new essay, and can resubmit TOK work. Your school's DP coordinator handles the registration, and the highest grade for each component counts toward the award.

Written by the Educifly team — IB and IGCSE subject specialists teaching students in 20+ countries since 2018. Grade distribution figures come from the IB Diploma Programme and Career-Related Programme Final Statistical Bulletin, May 2025, and assessment details from the IB Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge guides, published by the International Baccalaureate.