Choosing a topic for your IA

So its that time of the year. You gotta choose a topic for your IA… there’s a vast field of topics you could choose from and yet, you have no clue what to do. Without a topic, you can’t do anything. On the other hand, you can’t choose just any topic – it has to be good enough to fetch you required grades. So how to choose?

Different subjects are assessed using different criteria, but they have a few things in common – a focused and appropriate topic being one of them. The first thing to do is decide what you’re interested in. Then look for a topic related to that area. There’s a lot of information available online, and sometimes even whole IAs. I’m not saying you should copy them, but you can be inspired and select a topic that is similar (or a modified version of the sample). It won’t be completely original, but then none of the IAs are. Everything you do, everything you decide to write on has already been done at least once. So if you’re looking for a very unique topic (which is not really a requirement, but could get you very high scores if you do well) then chances are, you won’t find it online. It is not necessary to have a unique topic to get high scores, there are cases where even common topics scored very well.

You can choose a topic from one of the experiments in your textbook (not applicable to all subjects) and maybe change the variables or something. When choosing an article, take something short which is not already analysed so you can do that part (again, not applicable to all subjects).

In the end, your topic wouldn’t matter as much as your content, as long as it is focused and related to your content. Make sure the body is really good (pun not intended) and brag a bit in the introduction about why you chose the topic. If only “I couldn’t find any other topic but I had to write this bloody essay or I stand a chance to fail so there ya go!” counted as a good reason..