Acing Your November IB Exams

There may be a number of reasons why you are sitting your IB exams in November. Most students take November exams, however, because they are resitting. Now, there is nothing bad about this. Yes, it might be frustrating but there are so many different factors that can affect your exam performance. In this blog, I will run through my top tips for acing your November exams so you can say goodbye to you IB in style!

The Past is the Past…

My first tip is to try forget about your May exams results. If you are resitting, it’s easy to look back at the first time you took your exams and feel disheartened. This feeling is only intensified if your friends aren’t having to resit with you. Ultimately, this kind of thinking is not going to help you pass your exams this time around.

Instead, focus on the positives of doing your exams now. You won’t have the distraction of May weather, and you won’t have to deal with the strange phenomena which occurs during exam seasons where everyone wants to prove they are procrastinating the most. By bearing the positives in mind, you can focus less on things that went wrong in May, and more on how to do your best in November!

You Don’t Have to Start from the Bottom!

While it’s good to forget about your May exam grades, it can be useful to look critically at how you revised back then and how you can revise better now. Something which I often see with my students is that they simply did not have a revision strategy for the May exams. They either spent all their time making notes which they didn’t have time to learn, or in a blind panic tried some crazy revision methods that didn’t pay off (listening to all their history text books at 3x… no joke).

I would recommend, therefore, really taking the time to think about how you revise for the exam you are taking. If you are resitting Biology, for example, it is useful to go through the syllabus and figure out what you do and don’t know. Coming up with an effective revision plan with save you so much time in the long run!

Fill in the Gaps

My final tip is to work out what you do already know. I know it might not feel like it, but you will have learnt something in class! Ask your teacher (or google…) for the subject’s syllabus and work out what you need to know for each exam. Then, have a look back over your notes from school. Based on the notes you already have, work out how you can tactically revise. For exams where you don’t have to learn everything on the syllabus (like history) take the notes you already have and work on building them. Don’t try and learn a completely new topic!