Quick Answer
Analysis breaks something into its parts to show how it works. Evaluation judges how good, important or convincing it is. The IB defines analyse as 'break down in order to bring out the essential elements or structure' and evaluate as 'make an appraisal by weighing up the strengths and limitations'. Analysis asks how and why. Evaluation asks how well and so what, and it must end in a judgement.
What You'll Learn
- Analyse: take something apart and show how the parts connect. No verdict is needed.
- Evaluate: weigh strengths against limitations, then give a supported judgement.
- Analysis answers how and why. Evaluation answers how well, how far and so what.
- Most evaluate answers need analysis first, but analysis alone cannot earn the judgement marks.
- Assess is a judgement word, so it sits with evaluate, not with analyse.
The difference between analysis and evaluation
Analysis is about understanding. You break a topic, text, data set or argument into its parts and show how those parts work together. Evaluation is about judging. You decide how good, effective, reliable or important the thing is, using criteria and evidence, and you say so. The two skills use the same material but end in different places: analysis ends with an explanation of how something works, evaluation ends with a verdict. Here is the contrast point by point.
- Purpose: analysis explains how something works. Evaluation decides how well it works, or whether it matters.
- The question it answers: analysis asks what are the parts, how do they connect, why does this happen. Evaluation asks how strong, how significant, how far, compared with what.
- End product: analysis gives a clear picture of the structure, causes or relationships. Evaluation gives a judgement backed by reasons.
- Typical moves in analysis: separate, classify, link cause to effect, trace a mechanism, spot a pattern in data.
- Typical moves in evaluation: set criteria, weigh strengths against limitations, test the quality of evidence, compare alternatives, decide.
- Words that signal analysis in your writing: because, this leads to, as a result, which means, this depends on.
- Words that signal evaluation: more significant than, this is limited by, only holds when, on balance, therefore overall.
- Dependence: analysis can stand alone. Evaluation almost always rests on analysis, because you cannot judge something well until you understand how it works.
- Level of thinking: in the revised Bloom's taxonomy (remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create), analyse is the fourth level and evaluate the fifth.
- In the IB: the IB Psychology guide, for example, lists analyse under assessment objective 2 (application and analysis) and evaluate under assessment objective 3 (synthesis and evaluation).
Pro Tip
Quick test: read your conclusion on its own. If it says how something works, you have analysed. If it says how good, important or convincing something is, and why, you have evaluated.
What analyse means
The IB's glossary of command terms, printed in the DP subject guides, defines analyse as 'break down in order to bring out the essential elements or structure'. Everyday English uses the word the same way: to examine something closely by separating it into its parts. American English spells it analyze; the meaning does not change. The point of analysis is to reveal how a thing is put together and why it behaves as it does. You are not asked whether the result is good or bad. To analyse well:
- Separate the topic into components: causes, factors, stakeholders, stages, techniques or variables.
- Show the relationships between them: which factor drives which, what depends on what, where a pattern in the data comes from.
- Use evidence to demonstrate each link, not just to decorate the paragraph.
- Keep every part tied to the focus of the question and leave out parts that do not bear on it.
- Organise paragraphs by the parts you have separated, not by the order of events or the order of your notes.
Watch Out
The most common failure in analysis is description. Retelling events, restating a theory or reading figures off a graph is describing, however long it runs. Analysis starts when you show how one thing connects to another.
What evaluate means
The IB defines evaluate as 'make an appraisal by weighing up the strengths and limitations'. English exam boards say much the same: AQA, using the Ofqual list of command words, defines it as 'judge from available evidence'. In everyday English, to evaluate something is to judge its worth, quality or importance. Every evaluation has three parts: criteria (what counts as good, effective or important here), weighing (the evidence for and against), and a judgement (your verdict and the reason it wins). To evaluate well:
- Decide your criteria early: effectiveness, reliability, validity, significance, cost, ethics, short term against long term, or impact on different groups.
- Weigh strengths against limitations using evidence, and say which ones carry more weight.
- Test the conditions: for whom does it work, when, and under what assumptions?
- Reach a clear judgement that answers the question as set, and explain why that side outweighs the other.
Watch Out
A list of advantages followed by a list of disadvantages is not yet an evaluation. The marks for evaluation come from the weighing and from the judgement you reach.
Worked examples: the same topic analysed, then evaluated
The clearest way to see the difference is to take one topic and answer it both ways. These are illustrative questions written for this guide, not quotes from past papers, but they use the IB's command terms in the way exam questions do.
- Economics, analyse: 'Analyse the effect of a rise in interest rates on aggregate demand.' You trace the chain: higher borrowing costs reduce consumption and investment, a stronger currency can reduce net exports, so aggregate demand falls. You show the mechanism, usually with an AD/AS diagram, and stop there.
- Economics, evaluate: 'Evaluate the use of higher interest rates to reduce inflation.' You still use that chain, but now you weigh it: time lags, how much household and business debt is on variable rates, whether inflation comes from demand or from rising costs, and the risk to growth and jobs. You end with a judgement, for example that the tool works best against demand-pull inflation and is slow and costly against cost-push inflation.
- History, analyse: 'Analyse the causes of the First World War.' You separate long-term causes such as the alliance system, militarism, imperial rivalry and nationalism from the trigger, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, and show how they interacted to turn a regional crisis into a general war.
- History, evaluate: 'Evaluate the importance of the alliance system in causing the First World War.' Now you judge how much weight the alliances carry compared with other factors, for example by asking whether a general war was likely without them, and you reach a verdict on their relative importance.
- Biology, analyse: given data on enzyme activity at different temperatures, you identify the trend and the optimum temperature, explain the fall in activity above it by denaturation of the active site, and point out any anomalous results.
- Biology, evaluate: 'Evaluate the method used in this investigation.' You judge the method: were the variables controlled, were there enough repeats, how large are the uncertainties, and how far do the conclusions follow from the data? You end with an overall judgement and realistic improvements.
- Psychology, analyse: you take a theory such as the multi-store model of memory apart, setting out its stores, how information moves between them and what each part predicts about forgetting.
- Psychology, evaluate: 'Evaluate the multi-store model of memory.' You weigh its strengths, such as clear testable predictions and support from case studies of patients with brain damage, against its limitations, such as treating short-term memory as a single store, which the later working memory model challenged. You conclude how useful the model still is.
- English, analyse: you show how a poet's imagery, structure and sound work together to create meaning, for example how a shift from present to past tense marks a change in the speaker's attitude.
- English, evaluate: you judge how effectively those choices serve the writer's purpose, for example whether an ambiguous ending strengthens or weakens the poem, and you say which reading the text supports better.
Pro Tip
Notice that every evaluate example reuses the analysis. Strong evaluation is analysis plus criteria plus a verdict, not a different set of facts.
Assess vs analyse, and assessment vs analysis
Assess is a judgement word. It belongs with evaluate, not with analyse. AQA's command word lists, taken from the Ofqual list used by English exam boards, define assess as 'make an informed judgement' and analyse as 'separate information into components and identify their characteristics'. Assess does not appear in the IB Diploma command term glossaries we checked, including the Psychology guide's. When an IB question wants that kind of judgement, it normally uses evaluate, to what extent or discuss.
- Analyse: show how something works or what drives it. For example, 'Analyse the factors that affect the price of oil.'
- Assess: decide how important, effective or accurate something is. For example, 'Assess the importance of OPEC in setting oil prices.'
- Assessment vs analysis (the nouns): an assessment is a judgement or a measured verdict, as in a risk assessment. An analysis is a breakdown into parts, as in a data analysis. A good assessment usually rests on an analysis.
- Assess vs evaluate: very close in meaning. Both need criteria, evidence on more than one side and a conclusion. If you are unsure, answer an assess question the way you would answer an evaluate question.
How to turn analysis into evaluation
Most students who lose marks on evaluate questions have done the analysis well and then stopped. The fix is a short sequence you can apply to any paragraph.
- 1Analyse first: set out the mechanism, causes or structure in a few tight sentences.
- 2Name the criterion: what does good, effective or important mean for this question? Say it.
- 3Test the point against it: how strong is the evidence, how large is the effect, for whom, and over what time scale?
- 4Weigh: say which point matters more than the others and why. This is the step most answers skip.
- 5Judge: finish the paragraph with a mini-verdict that answers the question, then pull these together in your conclusion.
Pro Tip
Write your judgement in the first sentence of the conclusion, not the last. If you cannot write that sentence before you start, plan for another minute.
Mistakes that cost marks
Examiners mark against the command term. These are the patterns that most often keep answers out of the top bands.
- Answering an evaluate question with analysis only: strong explanation, no verdict, so the judgement marks stay empty.
- Evaluating when asked to analyse: time spent on a verdict the question did not ask for, while the links between the parts stay thin.
- Fake balance: three strengths, three weaknesses, then 'there are arguments on both sides'. That is not a judgement.
- A judgement that appears only in the last line: if the body never weighs anything, a one-line verdict looks unsupported.
- Generic evaluation: 'more research is needed' or 'it depends' without saying on what, or why it matters for this question.
- Describing and calling it analysis: narrating events or summarising a study without showing how its parts relate.