How to Study for IB Exams (HL and SL Revision Plan)

Studying for IB exams means revising against the command terms, not just the content. Every Diploma Programme question opens with an instruction word, and each one is tied to a defined level of thinking. Add six subjects running at once, three or four of them at higher level, and coursework marked alongside the papers, and IB revision stops looking anything like single-subject cramming.

Those four structural facts are what this guide is built on. They are also the reason a generic revision plan quietly fails an IB student: it optimises for knowing more, when a large share of the marks in front of you are awarded for answering the specific question that was asked, in the specific shape the command term demands.

What makes IB revision different from A-levels or AP?

Four things, and each one changes the plan. You carry six subjects rather than three or four. Those subjects split across two levels with genuinely different volumes of content. Your grade is not decided by exams alone. And the questions are marked against published criteria rather than against how well you did relative to everyone else.

The structure is set out on the IB Diploma Programme curriculum page: the curriculum is made up of the DP core plus six subject groups, and each student takes a minimum of three or a maximum of four subjects at higher level, and the remaining at standard level. The same page gives the number that should drive your timetable more than any other: standard level subjects take up 150 teaching hours. Higher level comprises 240 teaching hours. That is a 60 per cent difference in content sitting inside your own schedule, and most students revise as though it were not there.

Crucially, higher level is not marked more harshly. The IB states that HL and SL subjects differ in scope but are measured according to the same grade descriptors, with higher level students expected to demonstrate a greater body of knowledge, understanding and skills. The implication is practical: you are not fighting a stricter examiner at higher level, you are covering more ground. More ground needs more calendar, not more anxiety.

The second structural difference is that exams are only part of the picture. The IB uses both external and internal assessment in the DP. Examinations form the basis of assessment for most courses, but teacher assessment is used for most courses too, covering things like oral work in languages, fieldwork in geography, laboratory work in the sciences, investigations in mathematics, and artistic performances. An A-level or AP student can largely treat the exam as the whole game. An IB student cannot.

The third difference is the quietest and the most useful. The IB is explicit that student results are determined by performance against set standards, not by each student's position in the overall rank order. Nobody is competing with you for a fixed supply of top grades. What decides your mark is whether your answer meets the published standard, which is exactly why the command terms matter so much.

What are IB command terms, and why do they decide your mark?

A command term is the instruction word that opens an exam question, and the IB publishes a glossary of them in each subject guide, with a definition and an assessment objective level attached to every term. Those levels, usually written AO1, AO2 and AO3, are a ladder of cognitive demand. Answer an AO3 question at AO1 depth and the content can be flawless while the marks are not.

The glossary is not folklore passed between students. Here is the IB, in the command terms glossary of the DP global politics subject guide, with the definitions quoted as published. The AO levels and the exact term list vary between subjects, so treat this as the pattern rather than the universal list, and read the glossary in each of your own subject guides.

Read the AO1 rows against the AO3 rows and the ladder is obvious. AO1 asks you to retrieve something. AO2 asks you to apply it. AO3 asks you to judge, and to show the working behind the judgement. This is why "I knew all the content and still got a 5" is such a common IB complaint. Knowing the content is the AO1 layer. It is necessary, and on its own it caps you.

The marking machinery behind this is published too. In the same guide, the IB explains that an assessment objective describes what students should be able to do, and assessment criteria describe how well they should be able to do it. Open-ended tasks are marked with criteria or markbands using a best-fit approach, where each level descriptor is a statement of expected performance. Your job in an extended answer is to make the best-fit decision easy for the examiner by visibly doing what the term asked.

The revision habit that follows is small and unglamorous. Whenever you write a practice answer, write the command term at the top of the page first, and underneath it write the one thing that term obliges you to do. Evaluate obliges you to state limitations. Discuss obliges you to present more than one position. Compare and contrast obliges you to keep both items in view throughout. Then check your finished answer against that single line before you check it against the content.

How to build a revision plan across six subjects

Weight the plan by teaching hours and by distance from your target grade, then rotate through all six subjects every week rather than blocking one subject at a time. Blocking is the instinctive approach and it is the wrong one at this scale: with six subjects, a one-week block means five weeks between visits, which is long enough to lose most of what the block built.

Start with the arithmetic rather than with a colour-coded grid. Three or four subjects at 240 hours and two or three at 150 is not an even six-way split, and a plan that gives every subject the same weekly slot is quietly under-serving your higher level courses by about 60 per cent. Then adjust a second time for where you actually are: the subject furthest from its target grade earns extra time regardless of level, and your strongest standard level subject can survive on maintenance.

Rotating like this is not just scheduling convenience. Mixing subjects and problem types in one session rather than doing them in blocks is the interleaving study method, and it feels harder while producing better long-term recall, which is precisely the trade an IB student wants when the papers sit months away. The practical shape of the grid, and how to build one you will actually follow rather than admire, is covered in our guide to making a revision timetable that works.

Two more scheduling rules earn their place. First, protect a weekly slot for the subject you keep avoiding. Avoidance is information: it is almost always the subject where the gap is biggest, and it is the one that silently drags your total down. Second, do not plan the whole two years. Plan the next six weeks in detail and the rest as a rough allocation, because a plan drawn up in the first month of the course for papers two years away is fiction within weeks.

The broader problem of sequencing several exams that fall close together, and deciding what to drop when the calendar is impossible, is the subject of our guide to studying for multiple exams at once. The IB version of that problem is simply the permanent version: you never have fewer than six.

How do you use IB past papers when the marking is criterion-based?

Mark them against the criteria, not against the content. A past paper you score for right and wrong answers tells you what you know. A past paper you mark against the markscheme and the command term tells you why the marks were not awarded, which is the part that changes your grade.

The single highest-value drill in IB revision costs less than an hour. Take a past paper you have never sat. Do not answer it. Instead, go through every question and write only two things: the command term, and the one obligation that term places on the answer. Twenty questions in, two patterns usually surface. You will find command terms you cannot confidently define, which is a glossary problem you can fix tonight. And you will see how heavily the paper leans on AO3 terms, which is usually much more than students expect.

When you do write full answers, mark them in two passes. The first pass ignores content entirely and asks a single question: did this answer do what the term demanded? An evaluate answer with no limitations fails that pass no matter how good the content is. The second pass compares your answer with the markscheme for accuracy and coverage. Keeping the passes separate stops the familiar failure where you read the markscheme, recognise every fact in it, conclude that you knew the material, and learn nothing.

Then log the misses by cause rather than by topic. A record that says "lost marks on globalisation" is a description of where the miss happened, not why, and two students with the identical miss can need completely different weeks. Our guide to reviewing a practice test with an error log sets out that method in full. For IB specifically, add one category to the standard list: wrong command term response, meaning you wrote a correct answer to a different instruction. Once you are counting them, the size of that pile tends to be the most useful number in the whole log.

Sit full papers under real timing at least a few times before the exams, because IB papers with several extended responses punish poor pacing severely, and the only way to find your pacing is to run out of time somewhere it does not count.

Where the IA, extended essay and TOK fit in your plan

They fit in the same calendar as revision, because they compete for the same hours. The commonest planning failure in the Diploma Programme is treating coursework and revision as two separate projects, then discovering they occupy the same weeks.

The DP core sits alongside your six subjects and consists of creativity, activity, service; theory of knowledge; and the extended essay. The IB describes the extended essay as an independent, self-directed piece of research, finishing with a 4,000-word paper, and it is mandatory for every diploma student. Internal assessment, meanwhile, is the teacher-marked work inside each subject: the laboratory work in the sciences, the investigation in mathematics, the oral in languages, the fieldwork in geography.

Three habits keep this from eating your revision whole. Put every coursework deadline on the same calendar as your revision rotation, in the same colour, so the crowded weeks are visible months ahead rather than discovered. Treat a coursework week as a reduced-revision week on purpose, planned in advance, rather than as a week where revision silently disappears. And finish drafts early where you can: a deadline met a fortnight ahead converts directly into revision time later, which is the only place that time can come from.

There is a genuine bonus here that is easy to miss. Internal assessment and the extended essay force exactly the AO3 work the hardest exam questions ask for. Writing an evaluation of your own method, weighing limitations honestly, and defending a conclusion with evidence is the same skill that an evaluate or to what extent question rewards. Treat the writing you do for coursework as command-term practice and it stops being purely a cost.

Five ways IB revision goes wrong

Revising content and answering the wrong term. The most expensive mistake available to a well-prepared student. If your practice answers are not being checked against the term first, this is happening and you cannot see it.

Splitting time evenly across six subjects. An even split under-serves 240 hour courses and over-serves the ones you are already comfortable with. Weight by hours, then by distance from target.

Blocking one subject for days at a time. It feels productive and it means five weeks between visits to everything else. Rotate weekly and let spacing do the work.

Reading markschemes instead of marking against them. Recognising a markscheme point is not the same as having produced it. Write the answer first, always.

Leaving coursework off the revision calendar. The internal assessment and extended essay do not negotiate for time. Schedule around them or lose the weeks by surprise.

If you came into the Diploma Programme from a UK school, some of this will feel familiar and some of it genuinely is not. The habits that carried you through revising for GCSEs transfer well at the recall layer. What does not transfer is the scale: six subjects instead of a manageable exam-by-exam march, and marks awarded against published criteria rather than a mark scheme you can mostly reverse-engineer from practice.

How GeniusPal fits (and what it will not do)

The boundary first, because it is the part most study tools are dishonest about. GeniusPal cannot mark an evaluate or to what extent answer against IB criteria. It is not a marking tool, it has no chat window to argue with about a markband, and it does not know your subject guide. The command-term layer of IB revision, the part where you write an extended answer and judge it against a published criterion, is work you do with your teacher, your markschemes, and your own honest second pass.

What it does is the layer underneath. You cannot evaluate what you cannot recall, and with six subjects the recall layer is a genuinely large volume of material. Upload the source you already have, a PDF of a chapter, a set of lecture slides, a Word document, or your own notes, or paste text or a page link straight in, and GeniusPal turns it into a question set you can work three ways: a multiple-choice quiz, flashcards, or active recall, where you write the answer from memory and then compare it with the model answer.

Two details suit a six-subject load in particular. Each set is labelled with its subject, so your dashboard shows what you have actually been rotating through rather than what you remember rotating through, which is usually a flattering account. And each set keeps a weak pile: a wrong answer sends a question back around, two correct answers in a row retire it, and a review option redrills only what is still outstanding. That is the same retirement rule a good spaced repetition schedule applies to a deck of cards, running across the subjects you are already carrying.

The free plan covers 2 study sets for the lifetime of the account, which is enough to run one higher level topic through it and decide whether it belongs in your rotation.

Start with the cheapest thing on this page. Open any past paper for one of your higher level subjects, and write out the command term for every question along with the one obligation each term carries. The distribution of AO levels you find will tell you more about what your next three months should contain than any amount of rereading the syllabus.