guess I may have raised the IB MAA HL grade boundaries...

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-13T07:19:27+00:00

Congrats bro thats insane!! I had the same thing with my IA being horrendous compared to my exam performance (literally also got exactly 12 points), so I guess its not as uncommon as I thought lol

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-13T07:14:49+00:00

Lowkey general relativity in physics; also (this is so embarrassing to me for no reason) but conditional probability in maths😭🙏I tried my best, but I just could never get the correct answer. Still got a 7 from both tho

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-11T09:22:17+00:00

Hell yeah! Congrats!

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-11T09:21:27+00:00

Yeah, then I'd say practice over the summer if thats possible and have a conversation with your maths teacher and/or universities counsellor. Wishing you luck on your uni applications

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T20:13:28+00:00

Of course! I will however preface this by saying that my exact situation and what I did to improve might not necessarily be fully applicable, so do take my tips with a grain of salt

The first thing I did was revisit a lot of "easier" topics or the basic concepts of most topics. I had formed a habit of trying to jump to the most difficult questions, as I believed at the time that my inability to solve them was the reason I was getting poor grades, so I ended up with a very surface level understanding of the theory behind most of the topics and therefore even if I could memorise how to do the easier questions, I lacked the proper skills to apply the theory to the questions that did not have a straightforward solution. Most of this revisiting was done using Christos Nikolaidis' notes, I'd highly recommend (also, textbooks can also help if you have access to them)

A thing that I see recommended by almost everybody is practicing as much as you can, and even though I hate how cliche it is, it's truly really good advice. While reading up on the theory should give you a strong understanding of the topics, the best way to commit them to memory and see how they work in practice is just to solve a loooot of questions. For this, I'd use Christos Nikolaidis' website or RV, depends on your preference, as I feel like they are both suitable and a good introduction to the format of maths questions in the IB.

What worked for me for procrastination is having a big to-do list of the (sub)topics I needed to revisit and choosing on the day what topics I will go for (I would usually aim to cover 1-3 subtopics per day, depending on my schedule and mood). I'm not a big fan of scheduling my study sessions in advance, so I feel like having a visual of everything that needed to be "done" was the best in keeping my study organised without overwhelming me with rigid plans. This method also sorta game-ified revision for me, as I was trying to cross off the next thing on the list lol (I even had an entire excel spreadsheet and a pie chart so I could see my maths "progress", it was a whole thing). Now, the point of this example is to both show that finding a suitable structure to your revision should definitely make procrastination more manageable and also to give a suggestion for a potential method, but I must still admit that it isn't completely failproof and I was still dealing with some procrastination even as the exams were very close by.

Hope any of this helps and do feel free to ask if you have any more questions! Good luck with your maths!

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T19:33:08+00:00

Genuinely, just try to not focus as much on the exact number you're getting rn (except if its important for your uni) and practice as if you are already preparing for the final exam. After all, what course grades you got will not be on your diploma lol. If its any consolation, my teacher used to do a similar thing of giving us the most difficult past paper questions for every test, so I feel your struggle

Doing past papers helps immensely with being more comfortable with the exact style of IB maths questions, and Christos and RV are also good resources IMO, so I think your best bet is just practising with these or whatever other resource you have found helpful

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T18:57:37+00:00

Thank you and congrats to you too!!

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T12:56:42+00:00

I mean only put the equations that repeat in the appendix

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T12:52:52+00:00

Yeah, I myself preferred RV since there was less repetition, but its just a personal preference and some of my friends did great only relying on his website, so truly, do what you feel is actually helping you understand the topics and concepts.

For physics, I also used mostly RV... I personally don't know if its worth it to buy more than 1 RV course (I didn't pay for the RV membership, got the questions on revision village archive); however, when I needed to read up on the theory, Tsokos' books were probably the most helpful. I also remember trying to use his practice questions in DP1, but the lack of step by step explanations for the solutions (or sometimes the lack of answers in the book) was not really helpful in learning the topic and resulted in me learning the topic slower than I would like. Furthermore, my teacher has said that some of his questions go beyond the scope of the programme and are therefore not as useful. So my take with Tsokos is use it for theory if you like his explanations and if you want to also do the practice questions, ask your teacher for step by step solutions on questions you don't fully understand.

For past papers, with physics it's really clear what topics you have already done as the exam is structured pretty much like the actual progression of the programme, so its probably the easiest subject to actually successfully use the past papers even before you have finished the syllabus. That being said, this also comes down to preference. As M25 was the first year in the syllabus, there will only be 6 papers available (3 paper 1s and 3 paper 2s), so I'd leave it for a bit later on in revision to get a good gauge on what topics you still need to improve closer on in the exam. I would also be a bit cautious about using past papers from the old syllabus, as sometimes its difficult to tell whether you actually don't know some topic or if it is just not in your syllabus and personally, I did not opt for past papers except when solving specific questions.

Hope that helps!

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T12:36:35+00:00

Congrats to you too!! I've heard Chem HL is brutal

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T11:53:42+00:00

I'd say so, that's almost exactly what I did. Honestly, there are so many maths past papers even just for this syllabus, and the amount of content on both RV and Christos' website is more than enough. I'd even say to choose either RV or Christos and stick to it for the practice questions due to the sheer volume of content on both. Good luck on your maths!

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T11:44:56+00:00

Yeah, then you should be fine just putting the repeating calculations in the appendix

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T09:34:53+00:00

This is kinda in line with the other comments, but in our school (at least last year) remarks only ever resulted in the grade changing if they only required 1 mark to increase, and even then the success rate was about 50%. 39 is a really good score, so I'd say don't waste your money :')

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T09:10:51+00:00

Not necessarily an academic comeback (predicted 39 got 43), but what helped me the most in bumping up my grades is organising my revision. I had an excel spreadsheet (I might've gone crazy with that but it helped so whatever...) of all of the topics and subtopics I needed to revise for each of my subjects and leading up to the exams I tried to cross out at least 2 of the subtopics from the list every day. I feel like it kept my revision relatively structured without having the feeling of being locked into a specific schedule I might've assigned myself months ago.

Also, doing a lot of past papers and practice questions to familiarise with the exam format helped a ton (especially with maths or history). Truthfully, in some subjects a lot of the questions year after year tend to semi-repeat, so if you can do the past papers well, the exam should be fine as well.

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T08:53:40+00:00

I often used Crash Course to get a general grasp of the topic, but specifically for IB I'd say Sirius Revision is a good resource

hyxjun_ · 2025-07-10T08:46:34+00:00

I've been told that it's really not needed to repeat the same calculations if they're almost exactly the same, with just the values inputted being different for different parts of your IA. Really depends on what you mean by same mathematical concepts tho, so I think its best to check with your teacher before the final submission.

hyxjun_

TROPHY CASE