The Personal Project is not, in fact, a personal project - let’s change that.

By Zoe Ying

Photo by Disha Sheta from Pexels

As December 1st approached - the day the Personal Project product was due - Year 11 students were feeling stressed.  The year-long project, beginning in Year 10 and ending in Year 11, is designed as a student-led exploration into a student’s personal interests beyond their regular Middle Years Programme learning.  By all means, students should be driven to pursue their passions proactively: why, then, do they overwhelmingly dislike it?  In a survey conducted with twenty members of the current Year 11 cohort at renaissance College, sixteen out of twenty indicated that they were behind schedule, and eleven said it was a waste of valuable time and energy.

But problems with the Personal Project run deeper than poor time management or execution. They point to a fundamental failing in how it is constructed, which misleads students and ultimately subverts its intention, creating products students don’t learn from.  

Issues begin with its name: a graded school assignment, by definition, is not a personal project. A personal project is something which is done for personal satisfaction, and which doesn’t need a purpose - it is internally motivated.  It is about fostering well-being through the pursuit of personal interests.  Not only does the concept of assessment place pressure on students, but it also incentivises them to pick a project which is likely to grade well rather than something which excites them.  

So what exactly does the IB prioritise in its rubric?  The IB website says the Personal Project aims to stand “as a summative review of [students’] ability to conduct independent work”, meaning the process of producing a product is valued more than the content of the product itself, and that students can perform well or even better with an easy, mundane project they are not interested in than something challenging and mentally stimulating.  

Also, by emphasising independent work, the IB deprives them of a proper advice and feedback system, which causes it to be neglected below shorter-term, more immediate assignments and causes the final product to suffer.  Instead, by attempting to assess a student’s “ability to learn”, as the IB puts it, the system only creates bloated, functionally worthless assignments which encourage quantity of writing over quality.  

The way it stands now, the Personal Project neither meets its objectives of providing students with a channel to explore their interests nor spawns interesting, globally relevant products.  It frustratingly squanders an amazing opportunity to support students’ ideas and ventures - an opportunity to create change in the wider community - for the sake of assigning an arbitrary and largely worthless grade.  According to the IB website, over 150,000 students study the MYP globally - consider the innovations this vast human capital could realise if it were put to better use!

So how do we fix the Personal Project?  By encouraging students to pursue projects that match their tastes and personalities through dismantling the grading system.  By emphasising the product as the key culmination of student efforts, and providing students with appropriate time, tools and resources to realise their ideas.  And by matching students up with teacher experts who can provide directions and feedback to look critically upon what they produce.  Understanding and promoting individual passion is key to building social benefits.

Most of these initiatives would require substantial changes to the current Personal Project and are understandably difficult to implement and assess. However, combined, they have the potential to simultaneously reduce Personal Project-related stress and build our students as young leaders.  

Some may argue that the majority of students’ passions simply aren’t beneficial in real-world situations and that implementing this system is a waste of teacher time and school resources.  These people are both insensitive and wrong.  While not all projects are designed with clear, immediate contexts of use, the single greatest benefit of the revised Personal Project is giving students the curiosity to seek new ideas, and the drive to try something even if it doesn’t come to fruition.  

These aims are not being achieved with the current Personal Project, which is an enormous waste of time in a critical year of schooling. We need to implement great reform to structure the Personal Project around interesting projects and give students the opportunity for extensive feedback and help.  I think then we would find our students imbued with a deep love of learning - and themselves.