Five quick IB exam revision tips
At the time of writing, IB May exams are less than two months away, and our guess is that if you’re reading this article your teachers are finishing the last of the syllabus and you will be switching to full exam preparation mode.
Luckily, you’ve come to the right place. This article is from our author, Tim Williams, who has shared some of his most helpful tips and tricks for IB success, including how to revise for IB exams. Here, he gives five quick IB exam revision tips to help you prepare during the final weeks before your exams begin. Once you’re done reading, be sure to integrate them into your IB revision plan. Good luck with your exams!
IB exam revision: five quick tips
Make connections about the information you’re trying to learn. You can try and connect facts to each other, or attach extra information to facts you know well, or put information into a framework you already understand. But trying to remember facts without understanding them is very difficult and almost pointless.
Divide a topic into half a dozen sections and study them over different weeks. That way you get more practice thinking about the items of information. So, for example, you take ‘Cells’ in Biology and study their structure one week, the different kinds of cells the next week, processes within cells the next week, etc.
Repeated short tests are very effective. It looks as though it’s the effort of trying to retrieve information that makes it stick in your head, not just seeing or repeating it. So, if you can find a way to give yourself tests once a week on difficult topics, that will help. Looking at lots of past papers is effectively doing this.
Study early rather than late. Okay, a lot of complications here, but it’s fairly clear that if you have a lot of work to do it’s much better to get up early and do it, than to stay up late. If you stay up late, you think you’re working, but actually you monitor yourself badly, you have micro-sleeps without knowing, your recall rate goes down, and your performance the next day usually suffers.
Change the form of the information in some way. Just looking at it, or reading it, is pointless. You can turn text into diagrams; you can make a chapter into a mind map; you could explain it to a friend or your sibling; you can make a mnemonic; you could create a test on it to give to a friend - just do something with it.
More IB exam revision tips
There is a lot to consider when preparing for your IB exams, but the most important thing you can do is not panic. Keep focused on your goals and devise a plan to help you get there. If you need more advice on how to study effectively, avoid procrastinating, or develop your exam technique, check out the rest of the articles on our Study Skills resource page.
And if you need a boost to your revision, check out our range of study guides. They bring focus to your subject with an experienced IB teacher’s tips on what is important for the exam. And if you’re in the UK, we aim to deliver your order the next day.
