Five reasons you're not getting better at IB (and what actually fixes them)

I've tutored IB and MYP students for three years, more than a thousand sessions. The students who stay stuck almost never lack intelligence. They lack a system, and they show the same five habits. I recognise them within a few sessions now.

If you see yourself in three or more of these, that's good news: none of them has anything to do with talent.

1. You only review when a test is coming

The pattern goes like this. You learn a topic in class, understand it, feel fine, and don't touch it again until the unit test. Then you cram it back in, write the test and forget it again. In Year 2 you meet the same topic in a mock and it feels brand new.

That isn't a memory problem. It's how memory works. Things you don't retrieve fade, and they fade fastest in the first days. The research on this is very consistent. A meta-analysis of over 300 experiments on spacing found that the same amount of study spread out over time beats the same amount crammed together (Cepeda et al., 2006).

What fixes it: a short daily review block, 15 to 20 minutes, that has nothing to do with what's due this week. Flashcards with spaced repetition do the scheduling for you (more on that below and in my Anki guide). The point is that old topics come back before they've gone.

2. You don't trust the process, so you quit in week three

I've built revision plans for myself and for students. My own final-year plan in 2022 had a daily check-in, and I can see exactly where it broke: the ticks are solid for about a week, there's a "back on track" note on day nine, then blanks. A plan I built for a retake student in 2026 died in the same place, around week three.

Week three is when the novelty is gone and the results haven't arrived yet. Real improvement lags behind the work by weeks. On top of that, the methods that work feel worse while you do them. Testing yourself feels harder than rereading your notes, so it feels like it isn't working. In the classic experiment, students who reread a text felt more confident right afterwards, but the students who tested themselves remembered more a week later (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

What fixes it:

• Judge the week by what you did, not how you feel. "Did I do my blocks?" is a fair question. "Do I feel ready?" isn't, not in week three.
• Keep a one-line daily log: planned blocks, done blocks, one sentence. It takes 30 seconds, and it's the first thing that shows you're slipping.
• Expect the dip. If you know week three is the danger zone, you can plan an easier week there instead of abandoning the whole plan.

3. In Biology, you've "seen" everything and can recall almost nothing

Biology is the subject where this hurts most. The current syllabus runs from A1.1 Water to D4.3 Climate change, roughly 40 sub-topics, and Paper 1B and Paper 2 can pull from any of them. Most students I see have read everything. When I ask them to explain one sub-topic without notes, a large part of the course turns out to be missing.

The other pattern is avoidance. One student told me she "repeated everything and forgot it fast". When we looked closer, she had been revising the topics she liked, over and over, and quietly skipping the ones she was scared of.

What fixes it:

• Make the syllabus your checklist. One line per sub-topic, with a confidence rating you're honest about: red, yellow, green. That's how I organised my own IB Biology notes, and it's in the free Notion templates.
• Revise the red ones first. Avoiding them feels like progress, but it's the opposite.
• Test coverage, not familiarity. For each sub-topic, can you explain it out loud for two minutes and draw the diagram? If not, it's not done.

4. You don't do practice questions

Reading notes and answering exam questions are different skills. The IB doesn't ask you to recognise your notes. It asks you to apply them to a situation you haven't seen: an unfamiliar organism, a new data set, an experiment you never did. Students who only read get blindsided by exactly that.

In multiple-choice practice I see a specific trap. A student picks an answer, reads the solution and says "ah, that sounds logical". A week later they get the same question wrong again. "Sounds logical" isn't an explanation. If you can't say why the right answer is right and why each wrong one is wrong, you haven't learned it.

What fixes it:

• Questions every day, not just in the last two weeks. A handful a day beats fifty on a Sunday.
• After every question, right or wrong, say the reason out loud in one sentence.
• Keep a mistake log: what you got wrong, what type of mistake it was, and the rule that would have caught it. Most students find that the same three mistake types cost them most of their marks.

This is the reason I built Heptavo. It's 17,000 original exam-style questions with the mark scheme shown after every answer, so the practice-and-explain loop is built in. You don't need my app to do this, though. Any good question source works, as long as you do it daily.

5. You don't make flashcards (or you make bad ones)

Flashcards are the cheapest form of self-testing there is. Most students either don't make them or make cards that don't work: a whole paragraph on the back, or a question that can be answered by recognising one keyword.

What a good card looks like:

• Definition cards pass what I call the rucksack test: category plus the feature that makes it different. "A rucksack is a bag made for your back." "Osmosis is the diffusion of water across a partially permeable membrane." If your definition doesn't name the category, it isn't finished.
• Decision cards train choices, not facts. "Hypotenuse involved? → sin or cos. Angle sought? → inverse." "Data shows a gradient → transect. No gradient → random sampling." These are the cards that save marks under time pressure.
• One fact per card. If the back has three facts, it's three cards.

What a normal week looks like when this works

• Every day: 15–20 minutes of flashcards, plus a few exam-style questions with the reason said out loud.
• Three to five focused blocks a week of new material or weak (red) topics, rotated by subject. My revision plan guide shows the rotation I use.
• Once a week: go through your mistake log and redo the questions you got wrong.
• Every week: one honest look at the syllabus checklist. What turned green? What's still red?

None of this needs extra hours. It needs the hours you already spend to be spent on retrieving, not rereading.

Sources

• Cepeda, N. J. et al. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
• Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
• Dunlosky, J. et al. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.