This IB revision guide will help you prepare well for any of the IB test you will ever have to write in the diploma program.
Back in 2021, Help for Assessment conducted a small study to find out how difficult the IB program is. Our findings showed that, unlike in Advanced Placement, the IB program had a higher dropout rate because students considered subjects taught in the program to be too difficult to handle.
More often than not, the students that fail IB do so because they don’t have a proper study plan, let alone a revision guideline to prepare them for the IB tests. From what we understand, the IB program isn’t going to be as easy if you don’t have a proper revision plan in place.
So if you want to do well and score 35 marks in the IB program, you must have an effective study plan that you can stick to for the next two years.
The IB Revision Guide to Help You Score Better Grades
If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that many students will find IB difficult to handle because they don’t have an effective revision plan.
Given how difficult the program is, going through the 2 years of content without a strategy is the best way to fail. Trust us when we say that IB can increase your stress level and cause you to perform poorly in your exams.
Fortunately, you can stay on the right track by simply having a comprehensive revision plan to guide you throughout the study process.
1. Organize Your Revision Notes Properly
As an IB student, you must have mastered the art of taking detailed notes. But while constantly writing notes is a good habit that students should develop, your notes won’t be helpful if you don’t organize them properly.
Let’s face it:
Many students have a tendency to write their notes carelessly. But having write ups all over the place is a way to fail IB. If your notes are all over the place, you will waste a lot of time hunting for the right material to read and never study at all.
So get your notes organized if you want to have an easy time revising for your IB.
2. Revise Your IB at the Right Time
Organizing your notes is just one of the steps to unlocking your revision potential. The next thing you need to do is to create a revision schedule that will get you to read as much as you should.
There is no right or wrong approach to creating a revision schedule. But we suggest looking at your exam calendar and use it as a guideline to create a study plan.
The optimal time to start revising a topic is at least 38 days before your exams. With respect to this timeline, your first round of revision should be on the first day, the second round on the eighth day, and the third round on the day before the test.
This method is perfect for efficiently reviewing and ensuring that you do not forget anything during your tests.
3. Use the Anchor Technique to Revise Your IB
The anchor technique is an approach popularized by Nail IB, and it can be an effective way to do your revision well.
This technique involves associating ideas and formulae with anchors that you build while learning them for the first time. It helps you to train your mind to remember what you’ve already learned, regardless of how complicated they may be.
The idea behind this is that when taking the test, you are stimulating the same atmosphere that you were in while studying. The vast majority of the connections are conceptually incomprehensible, but that’s all part of the process. All they have to do is provide your brain a trigger to assist you remember what you learned.
4. Finish Your EE, IA, and CAS Hours Before You Start Revising for Your IB Exams
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to start revising for your IB exams before finishing the Extended Essay, Internal Assessment, and CAS reflection. You need to make sure you have these tasks completed so you can have an easy time for revision.
Handling multiple tasks at the same time will make it difficult for you to focus on revision, and you might fail IB as a result.
So if you haven’t written your Extended Essay, Internal Assessment, and CAS reflection, we strongly recommend that you finish them first. By doing so, you will have an easy time focusing only on the revision, which can increase your chances of scoring top marks.
5. Use the Pareto Principle as a Guideline to Revise for Your IB Exams
The Pareto Principle states that 80% of outcomes are often by 20% of causes, implying an uneven connection between inputs and outputs. This concept serves as a reminder that the input-output connection is unbalanced.
This idea is a perfect fit for your revising strategy. You should find the 20% of information in each topic in your IB that you can use to answer 80% of the questions.
The best way to figure this out is to talk to your teacher. More often than not, they will gave an idea of what’s important and therefore give you a great lead so you can revise only the most important questions in the subjects you chose to study.
Another technique that can help you to figure out your 20% is to look for a trend in previous IB exams. You may notice a few themes that come up repeatedly and find the most appropriate area to focus on entirely throughout the revision process.
Final Thoughts
This guide is by no means exhaustive lists of ideas that can help you revise more effectively in IB, but it gives you some useful insights that you can use to get the most out of your revision.
IB doesn’t have to be difficult. While it’s the most challenging education framework taught in 97 countries, frequent revision can go a long way to make a big difference.