IB Design Technology — Study Hub

Two written papers and a design project at both levels — there is no Paper 3 in the 2027 guide. Paper 1 is entirely multiple choice: 30 marks in one hour at SL for 20% of the grade, and 40 marks in an hour and a half at HL for 25%. Paper 2 is short answer and extended response built on the analysis of a product: 50 marks in an hour and a half at SL for 40%, and 80 marks in two and a half hours at HL for 45%. The 50-hour design project is marked out of 33 and is worth 40% at SL and 30% at HL.

May 2027. The redesigned guide reorganises the whole course into a matrix of four organising ideas against three themes, and abolishes the HL Paper 3 the outgoing course had. Papers written for the previous syllabus still test many of the same ideas, which is why our past-paper coverage maps the older questions onto the new topics — but the mapping is ours, not the IB’s, and whole outgoing topics such as classic design and innovation and markets are deliberately not counted, because the new guide does not examine them.

HL runs to 240 teaching hours against 150 at SL and adds eleven whole topics, most of them quantitative. Theme A gains structural, mechanical and electronic systems; theme B gains the applied versions of all three plus manufacturing techniques and production systems; theme C gains beyond usability, life-cycle analysis and design for manufacture. In the exams HL sits a longer Paper 1 examined on SL and HL material, and a Paper 2 of 80 marks rather than 50 — so the design project, which is the same task and the same 50 hours at both levels, counts for 30% of an HL grade instead of 40%.

Paper 2, for most students, because it is built on the analysis of a product and will not accept a rehearsed definition. The question puts something real in front of you and asks what a designer should do about it, so the marks come from tying the theory to that object. At HL the other common difficulty is unit conversion in the calculations: an area left in square millimetres makes a stress answer a million times too small, and stage ratios that are added rather than multiplied turn a 90:1 gear train into a 21:1 one.

Fifteen: analyse, apply, construct, demonstrate, describe, design, evaluate, explain, identify, justify, label, list, outline, present and state. That list is shorter than most subjects’, and words students expect to see — compare, calculate, define, suggest, discuss — are not on it. Answering the term you were actually given, rather than the one you assumed, is one of the cheapest marks in the subject.

Answer the command term exactly — outline wants the shape of an idea, explain wants the mechanism and its consequence, justify wants the alternative you rejected. In Paper 2, name the product in your answer so the examiner can see you analysed it rather than recited the theory. At HL, convert every unit before you substitute and sense-check the result: an efficiency above 100% always means a figure is wrong. And whenever you choose a material, a process or a production system, give the number — the property, the volume, the tolerance — that made it the right choice.