Hello fellow IB students! Congratulations on being initiated into one of the most rigorous education programmes. Forewarning: it’s going to be tough – sometimes you might feel like you’re drowning in coursework, your ToK essay sounds like Stanford-Encyclopedia-of-philosophy-for-dummies, you’re getting the same type of question wrong on every single past paper… don’t worry, we’ve all been there.
I took my exams in Nov 2020, so my experience may be a little different due to COVID-19. But I hope some things I’m sharing below might help in terms of how you plan out your long IB journey, because it is a marathon and not a sprint and requires some thought before diving straight in.
My subject combination for your reference:
- HL History, Economics and Chemistry
- SL Chinese B, English Literature and Math
- History EE
General Advice
1, Coursework is no less important than examination papers.
The heavy weightage of coursework like Internal Assessments, Extended Essay, Internal Orals, ToK Presentation etc means that you need to value each coursework assignment. That means taking the first draft seriously. Some would not put in 100% in their first draft because they assumed they would get a second chance, but then you lose out on a valuable chance for feedback from your teacher.
2, Make full use of your resources available
I was really lucky to have a set of brilliant teachers and I would actively seek them out with questions (saved me private tutor fees!). I remember for my weakest subject Chem HL I would do practice papers and post-it-note a bunch of questions that I didn’t understand I then looked for my chem teacher around once a week to clarify all the questions I had until the concepts were completely clear.
Lots of people underestimate how important it is to pay attention during classes and be engaged, because teachers are your most consistent point of feedback. If you have a private tutor then great, but don’t be the person who’s confused during lesson time but doesn’t bother to clarify with the teacher because you assume you can just go for tuition once a week and learn it there — you’re then missing out on an average of 5 hours x 5 days a week of school learning.
This seems like pretty self-explanatory advice but try your best to pay attention and be engaged during class time – ask questions, participate in discussions, understand the material as you’re learning it. Don’t wait until the revision period before exams (ie summer of Year 2) to start making notes.
3, Pace yourself.
I’ll go more in-depth into my IB scheduling below, but there are 2 pieces of advice I would give regarding coursework and exam revision.
Finish coursework ASAP. Get IAs and ToK and EEs out of the way as quick as possible (without compromising quality), definitely by mid-Year 2 you should be solely focused on exam material and not coursework.
Leave ample time for revision. For subjects like chemistry and math where there’s an element of predictability in the papers, I finished all the Paper 1 and 2 papers of previous years by June 2020 (middle of my Year 2 Summer Break) and systematically flagged out all the questions that I consistently answered wrong, which became my basis for focusing revision on the concepts that I struggled more with from July-Oct (my last term).
For my humans subjects like lit, history and econs, consistent writing practice helps. Even if your teacher doesn’t assign any homework, try to write at least part of an essay each week — it’ll take you like 30mins-1h and keeps concepts fresh in your head.
Go slow but steady. I wouldn’t say I had no life for my Year 1 — on a normal week I just focused on getting the basic requirements of schoolwork done and understanding the topics we covered in class at home completely. This meant making sure I had a comprehensive set of notes by the time we finished a topic. Lots of people think they‘ll make notes once they start properly hunkering down to revise for exams (ie during their last summer break) but it’s much more efficient to start building a good foundation early, then you can hit the ground running during your intense revision months.
4, Study smart, organise your revision.
This is more specific to the sprint, say 6-8 weeks leading up to the final Nov exams.
Take the time to organise your revision. Prioritise topics that you are weaker in. If you have heard of active recall I would say this is vaguely similar, but tbh I don’t quite know if I ever truly implemented active recall “correctly” For me I found it useful to plan out the topics (especially for the more content-heavy subjects like History) that I had to cover so that I wouldn’t miss out on anything.
In creating a realistic study planner there are a few things you should keep in mind:
- Don’t over-pack yourself. I always attempted around 3-4 “things” per day (4 is if my tasks were relatively small). Also this timetable is by no means a 100% accurate representation of my break because I didn’t follow the timing brackets religiously.
- Be more generous with time. Yes, realistically you are supposed to finish your history essay in 45 minutes. But you’ll probably take an hour, you’ll get tired and meander down to the kitchen for a mid-morning snack, so give yourself 1.5 hours. If not you’ll just get stressed out because you can’t meet the insane workload you tried to cram in a day.
- Plan out your rest breaks, exercise times and mealtimes (as you can see I have lunch, tea time and dinner) because you can’t study 24/7. Please shower.
- Distribute your subjects. I personally found it useful to spread out subjects instead of spending one day cramming History, the next Econs, the next Chem etc. This strategy may not be favoured by everyone but I liked that after spending 2 hours memorising History facts, I could switch it up and work on Math problem sums.
Aside from a master revision sheet, I also had checklists for some subjects. For History it helped me keep track of the topics, for Chemistry it tracked which papers I had completed. Some things you can take away are:
- Highlight topics that you are weaker in / need to focus on
- Checklist: revise the notes/ essays/ practice you have on those topics
- Do new practice (whether that’s writing an essay or trying new problem sums) to reinforce those concepts
This spreadsheeet also reminded me to go back to specific topics (similar to active recall) so that I could revise a large number of topics that continue staying fresh in your mind. For instance if I revised 1894 Sino-Japanese War on Monday, I would go back to it next Wednesday and bullet-point the content I had revised. If you focus on cramming topic by topic, then by the time you’ve finished revising the 1950s American Occupation of Japan you’ll have forgotten about the 1894 Sino-Japanese War.
Scheduling / Pacing yourself
The timeline of everyone’s IB journey will look different based on your subject combination but the general advice I would give would be to pace yourself through the 1.5-2 years. Don’t start only working in Year 2, below are some tips to avoid overwhelming yourself:
FIRST TERM OF YEAR 1 (JAN-JUN 2019 FOR ME)
- You can spend the first 6 months of Year 1 focusing on learning content and engaging with your extracurriculars. Aside from completely homework required, I spent the rest of my time engaged many non-academically related aspects of high school.
- End of Term 1 : that’s when I began learning about Internal Assessments (IAs) and preparing for them. Not necessarily preparing as in writing the actual content, but familiarising myself with the process of researching and presenting them.
- Began reading material for practice History IA (my school’s history department has a mandatory practice IA process where all the history students in the grade mimic the IA research process and write an essay on the same topic)
- Similarly for Chemistry we would do many lab reports that are not as comprehensive as a complete IA but important nonetheless to familiarise yourself with the experimental process and presentation/processing of data (rounding off significant figures gave me so much grief)
- Began the first out of three of my Economics IA
SUMMER BREAK JUN/JUL-2019
Frankly I spent this break holidaying and enjoying life but I would recommend that you take this time to start brainstorming your Extended Essay topic. You don’t have to do intensive research but you can narrow down the scope of topics you’re interested in.
SECOND TERM OF YEAR 1 (JUL-DEC 2019) & WINTER BREAK OF YEAR 1 (DEC-JAN 2019)
This term was really a blur – the workload started getting heavier and I also had to juggle extracurricular commitments. I just remember lots of deadlines for practice things (ie Practice ToK essays, practice Chem reports, practice IAs etc).
The winter break was when you should aim to get coursework sorted. This includes:
- Working on your IAs
- Working on your Extended Essay!! Do not procrastinate this because you may think your first draft is due 4 months away but trust me do all the research and force yourself to do some writing before the truckload of Term 2 Year 2 hits you.
- Get plenty of rest to prepare for the deep dive into Year 2.
TERM 1 YEAR 2 (JAN-JUN 2020):
Probably the most stressful term of my IB journey personally – many of my friends also experienced this where our coursework deadlines seemed to concentrate in the Feb-March months. I believe I had my Final History IA, EE first draft, ToK presentation, practice Chemistry IA, Econs IA, Final Math IA to name a few. So this just serves to emphasise two points:
- Prepare beforehand in your winter break. Whether this is researching/ drafting some paragraphs of your EE and IAs, or making sure you understand the experimental and reporting process of your science subject.
- Don’t leave things to the last-minute. AKA don’t start writing your math IA 3 days before the deadline — I always gave myself at least 2 weeks to write the first draft of any coursework.
SUMMER BREAK JUN/JUL-2020
Your strategy here is critical because by this point you should be ready to hit the ground running with revision. By now you should have:
- Made a solid set of notes over the last 1.5 years that you can refer to. Now is too late to be scrambling to make notes.
- Have done a significant number of practice problems/ essay titles such that you can hone in on specific topics that you are weak in.
Personally I found my revision during summer break more crucial the 2-week October break just before exams. Leading up to final exam period there was more of an element of cramming for my essay-based subjects, especially history and literature where you have to memorise factual evidence. But for subjects like Chemistry and Math (and to a certain extent econs) I actually did not intensively increase my studying time because I had already practiced virtually all the questions I could by July/August, I mainly spent the time looking over the key concepts that I consistently messed up on.
OCTOBER STUDY BREAK
I’ve already given suggestions on how to create a study plan above, these 2 weeks should be you mentally preparing yourself for the exams. That includes focusing on topics that you are spotting and topics you are unfamiliar with.
JR's Journal 