Why This Matters

"The criteria are too vague for my students to use — so I wrote my own rubric with clear point values."

That sentence contains a real problem and a wrong fix. The problem is real: raw, published criteria are written to apply across an entire subject group and every possible task, which makes them abstract on purpose. Handed to a 13-year-old with no translation, "evaluate the reliability of sources" doesn't tell them what to actually do this Tuesday. But inventing your own rubric to solve that — assigning point values, adding requirements the criteria never mentioned — quietly replaces official criteria with something that isn't valid MYP assessment at all. There's a correct middle path, and it has a name: task-specific clarification.

Understand the Idea

Task-specific clarification means taking the published criterion and strand language and making it concrete for one particular task — without altering what the descriptors actually require. You're not writing a new rubric. You're translating an existing one into the specific content, format, and context of this assessment.

Here's the distinction that trips people up: clarification can be qualitative or it can accidentally become quantitative, and only one of those is safe.

A qualitative descriptor describes the character of a good response — its reasoning, its depth, the way it handles complexity. "Evaluates the reliability and relevance of sources to the argument" is qualitative: it tells a student what kind of thinking to do.

A quantitative descriptor counts things — "uses five sources," "writes 800 words," "includes three examples." Counting isn't inherently useless as classroom guidance, but the moment a count becomes the thing you're actually assessing, you've drifted away from the criterion's real demand and toward something a student can satisfy mechanically without doing the thinking the criterion is trying to capture. A student can cite five unreliable sources and "pass" a quantitative bar while completely failing the qualitative one the criterion actually cares about.

So the discipline of task-specific clarification is: keep the published language's qualities intact, and add only task-specific detail that helps a student recognize what those qualities look like in this task, in this content. You can name the specific content students must address ("using evidence from the industrialisation case studies we examined"), the specific format ("in a 600–800 word structured response"), or the specific context ("responding to the question of who benefited and who was displaced") — because those are genuinely task-specific and don't touch the descriptor's actual demand. What you can't do is soften, add to, or reword the underlying skill demand itself. 📌 Official source: current guidance on what task-specific clarification permits and doesn't permit is set by the IB and may be revised — check your subject guide and any current MYP assessment guidance before finalizing wording, rather than relying on a colleague's rubric from a previous year.

🧭 Planning decision: In your unit planner, task-specific clarification usually lives right next to (or attached to) the summative task description — not buried in a separate document students never see. If students can't find it next to the task, it isn't doing its job.

See It in Practice

Let's take a criterion strand that (illustratively — not quoted from any real guide) deals with using and evaluating sources, and watch it get clarified two different ways for the same Grade 8 "change and industrialisation" essay task.

Weak clarification (quantity-based, drifted from the actual criterion):

"Top band: uses at least 5 sources, including 2 primary sources. Includes a bibliography with correct formatting."

Read that again as a student would. It tells you exactly how to satisfy it — count to five, grab two primary sources, format a bibliography — without requiring a single moment of judgement about whether any of those sources are actually reliable or relevant. A student could hit every number here with five weak, tangential sources and technically "meet" this version, while a student with three sharply chosen, well-interrogated sources would look like they're falling short. That's the quantitative descriptor failing the criterion it claims to represent.

Strong clarification (quality-based, task-specific, faithful to the criterion):

"Top band: evaluates the reliability and relevance of the sources used to investigate industrialisation's impact on this community — for example, questioning whether a factory owner's account and a labour organizer's account might each carry bias, and explaining how that affects the claims the response can confidently make."

Notice what changed. The word count and source count disappeared. What replaced them is task-specific — it names the actual content ("industrialisation's impact on this community," "a factory owner's account," "a labour organizer's account") — but it's still asking for the same underlying skill the criterion strand actually demands: evaluation of reliability and relevance, not accumulation of citations. A student reading this knows what kind of thinking earns the top band, in language anchored to their actual assignment.

⚠️ Common trap: Writing a clarification so specific it effectively becomes a checklist ("must mention the 1833 Factory Act, must mention child labour, must cite two named historians"). That's over-specification — it turns an open evaluative task into a scavenger hunt and can penalize a student who makes an equally strong argument using different, equally valid evidence.

Apply It

🛑 Do this now. Go back to the summative task you designed in Article 14, and the strand breakdown you built in Article 21's Apply It exercise.
  1. For the top achievement band of one strand, write the published qualitative language as your starting point (do not invent it — copy it accurately from your current subject guide, or paraphrase it faithfully if your guide restricts quotation).
  2. Add task-specific detail: name the actual content, sources, or context students will be working with in your task. Resist the urge to add a number.
  3. Read your draft clarification and ask: does this still require the same command term and depth of thinking the original strand demands, or have I quietly swapped it for something easier (or harder) to count?
  4. Test it: imagine handing this single sentence to a real student in your class and asking them to explain, in their own words, what a top-band response would need to show. If they can only answer with a number ("five sources"), rewrite it.

Artefact to produce: One completed task-specific clarification sentence (or short paragraph) per strand for your summative task, written in student-facing language, ready to sit next to your task instructions.

Avoid This

Writing a rubric from scratch instead of clarifying the published one. Symptom: your rubric has point values, weightings, or categories that don't map onto any published criterion. Fix: start from the actual criterion and strand text every time; clarify, don't replace.

Over-specifying content until the task becomes a checklist. Symptom: students ask "do I have to mention X specifically or I'll lose marks?" Fix: clarify the quality of thinking required, and leave room for more than one valid path to it.

Clarifying once and reusing forever. Symptom: the same clarification text gets copy-pasted onto a completely different task next semester. Fix: task-specific means specific to this task — rewrite it each time, even if the criterion is the same.

Assuming clarification is optional busywork. Symptom: handing students the raw published criteria with zero translation and being surprised when they don't understand feedback. Fix: treat the clarification step as part of designing the task, not an add-on after the fact.

Check Yourself

Look at a rubric line you've written (or one you inherited). Does it ask a student to count something, or to demonstrate a quality of thinking? If it's a count, can you rewrite it in one sentence so it asks for the quality the criterion actually cares about instead?

Continue Learning

Next step → Article 24 moves from the summative task itself to what happens in the weeks before it — formative assessment that actually feeds this rubric. Downloadable resource: Task-Specific Clarification template. 📌 Official source: verify current guidance on what task-specific clarification does and doesn't permit against your subject guide before publishing any rubric to students.