IB candidate website login: personal code, PIN and common fixes

Three details to check before trying the login again

Treat the personal code, session PIN and exam session as separate pieces of information. A password saved from an earlier session may not be the credential for a later retake. If the portal rejects the combination, repeated guessing is less useful than asking the coordinator to verify the current candidate access details.

An account-access problem and a missing result are different issues. First establish whether you can sign in. Then check whether the expected session and subject results appear. When contacting support, describe the error and time it happened, but do not email your PIN to IBretake or post a screenshot containing credentials.

Read and interpret your results · Check the review window · Arrange an official transcript

• Check for copied spaces and confused characters in the code.
• Confirm that you are using the official candidate service linked by the IB.
• Ask the coordinator to verify the session and access-release time.
• If a result is missing after login, name the subject and level instead of treating it as another password problem.

What you need to log in

The credentials come from the programme coordinator, not from IBretake and not from a public registration form. The IB says it cannot give candidates these details directly for data-protection reasons.

Each examination session has its own credentials. If you sat exams in more than one session, keep the matching code and PIN together so you do not open an older result set.

• Use the official candidates.ibo.org address.
• Have the code and PIN for the correct examination session.
• Enter the characters exactly as supplied.
• Never send the PIN to a university or admissions service.

Fix a failed login without making it worse

Copy and paste can help, but copied spaces cause failures. Remove leading or trailing spaces and try a compatible browser; the IB currently recommends Firefox for the candidate website.

After three failed attempts, wait for 30 minutes of inactivity before trying again. Repeated attempts during the lockout do not solve the underlying problem.

• Check zeros, letter O, ones and lowercase l carefully.
• Use the current-session credentials.
• Remove spaces introduced by email or PDF copying.
• Wait out the lock before the next attempt.

Why last year's results appear

Credentials are session-specific. Seeing old results usually means the login belongs to an earlier May or November session, not that the new results disappeared.

Ask the coordinator for the credentials attached to the current registration. Retake candidates may have a separate PIN for every session in which they were registered.

Lost personal code or PIN

Contact the DP or CP coordinator at the school where you were registered. Schools can retrieve credentials for graduates from November 2004 onward even if the staff member has changed.

For sessions before November 2004, results are not available through the candidate website. The graduate should use the official replacement-results or transcript route instead.

After you get in: read the result properly

Record the subject grade, scaled total mark, lower boundary, upper boundary and marks required for a grade increase where the detailed view is available. Those numbers are more useful than a screenshot of the final grade when discussing a remark.

Do not share the live login with a university. Use the IB transcript service or the school process to send official results.