Emilia Cafiso

Junior Harper Adatto works on her Extended Essay in Advanced Leadership.

Beginning with the class of 2025, all diploma candidates will have to complete the Extended Essay (EE) as juniors rather than during their senior year.

 As part of completing the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma, Lincoln juniors and seniors who opt into the program must write a 3,500 to 4,000 word research paper and meet at least three times with an advisor, often a teacher at Lincoln, according to the IB official website. 

Students can choose any topic for their EE. However, according to the IB official website, it must relate “to one of the student’s six DP [Diploma Program] subjects.”

Kim Bliss, IB coordinator and Theory of Knowledge (TOK) teacher, has taught the EE for five years at Lincoln. He previously worked at Hillsboro High School as an IB coordinator and teacher. Bliss aims to make the EE process less stressful by requiring that all diploma candidates finish the EE in their junior year. 

“Students return [their senior year from the summer] having not done their extended essays,” says Bliss. “What that did was create a really unfortunate situation where seniors underestimate the time dedicated to college applications. After about five years of that cycle, we decided to try a new model. The new model has a lot more structure and support for the Extended Essay in the junior diploma workshop course.”

In her EE, senior Anna Catherine Sgroi focused on how twin and adoption studies contribute to the discovery of how nature and nurture influence alcohol abuse disorders. She says she attended multiple EE “lock-ins,” where the library was reserved for diploma candidates who needed dedicated time to write the essay on select school days and weekends.

“We were expected to [write the EE] over the summer,” says Sgroi. “When we got back to school, [our TOK teacher] had us fill out a Google form of where we were at. He showed the results to our class; lo and behold, everybody [had] 200 words out of the 4,000.”

Lincoln diploma candidates wrote their EEs on a variety of topics. For example, senior Diego Hodge wrote his EE on “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver, who transposed Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to author a modern exploration of the opioid epidemic in the U.S. 

“One day, I got an article on my phone from The New York Times about the top ten best books of the year,” says Hodge. “This was actually the day that [Amanda-Jane Elliot, English and TOK teacher] assigned the Extended Essay. [“Demon Copperhead”] was the number-one book of the year and won a Pulitzer Prize. I knew that this would be an interesting topic to take on.”

Bliss believes the IB diploma is more attainable with the new deadline and added EE support to juniors.

“You’re going to spend the time you spend, but your relationship with [the EE] is entirely your own,” says Bliss. “When talking to kids at the beginning [of the EE writing process], I ask, what do you want out of the experience? Some kids are like, I want to write the best paper possible. Other kids say, I just need to get it done. In the new model, you’ll be OK.”