Andrew's IB Maths Vault

Hey there cuties. For many of you, summer's right around the corner, and I'm sure some of you are looking for more questions to do before your end-of-year exams or to prepare for DP2. You're at the right place - I'll give y'all a collection of resources that will be useful for your preparation. IB-specific resources 1. Christos Nikolaidis's website:   IBDP homepage . He has more resources for AA students, but AI folks would also find some of them useful. I recommend taking a look at his topic tests. I'm not a biggest fan of his lecture notes to be honest, but if they work for you, by all means, go for it. The exercises are pretty routine and predictable. I'd say they're representative of the real exam, but in my opinion , they're a little boring and you need to learn to be able to solve these questions without such scaffolding on D-day. 2. IB Task Maker :  IB Test Maker   Even though it is a paid product to get access to all questions, there'...

G'day folks. Today's post is gonna be a bit random (as the title suggests) and a bit anecdotal simply based on my experience teaching this topic. So last Monday I had the chance to teach optimisation to a lower-attaining student. Her understanding of calculus is frankly quite shaky, but I wasn't prepared to know that her geometry skills are also severely lacking. She didn't know how to find the areas of shapes as well as the volumes of prisms; initially I planned to use a short activity on expressing perimeter/volume in algebra but ended up reteaching the formulae (no time to explain why  the formulae work or do more examples, because we only meet once a week for an hour). From my experience reading the examiners' reports, optimisation is usually the worst-performing question and the problem usually lies in setting up the models properly. I suspect that my student was far from alone - many people I've talked to struggled with optimisation for the same reason. S...

Pacing. The key difference between a 6 and a 7. Somewhat important to other grades as well though not as much as the 6/7 borderline. You've heard a lot of people telling you different things about pacing, i.e., how fast you should answer a question on the exam, with the most popular advice is "spending a mark a minute".  I'm not entirely convinced that's the best strategy. Grades 6/7 borderline If you're shooting for a 6 or 7, you're more likely to breeze through the first couple questions of each section. A 4-marker may take you a minute to do because you're well-prepared for anything at the lower end. This does not  mean you should rush to finish the easy questions, because a mark you dropped here has to be made up with a mark from a question further down the line, but you'll find yourself having a lot of spare time after breezing through more than half of the paper.  The harder questions at the end of each section (AA) or paper (AI): you're ...

Hiya! It’s Andrew, it’s Saturday and I’m back with another long-ish blogpost.   Today’s blogpost title is greatly inspired by Kieran Mackle, a podcaster whose focus is on primary education and has nothing to do with IB. I just found the title interesting. x   Ah yes, today we’ll talk about time management. An age-old problem. From a very personal perspective, I think we’re increasingly obsessed with time management that we sometimes spend more time planning the things we’d do instead of actually getting them done. It really doesn’t have to be this way.   All of us living on this planet have 24 hours, no more, no less. Some people would advocate overwork yourself to get more work done. I firmly disagree, simply because it isn’t sustainable for me. Those who know me probably know that I hang out with my friends very often but I still get shit done at an acceptable level. This post is simply a place for me to share my thoughts and tips on how to get shit done ...

Saturday’s somewhat-long-blogpost: Using past papers effectively and a brief introduction to designing assessments It’s a Sunday afternoon and you have nothing better to do than printing past IB exams ready for a long grinding session. Or you’re trying to calm down your own full-blown panik stations after doing my trivial mock exams. Whichever camp you’re in, a question you may ask yourself is how to get the most out of these papers. Don’t worry,  I’ve got your back.   When to use past papers? Perhaps a couple months before the exam, ideally when you’ve finished most of the content. No sooner than that.   If you’re used to doing past paper questions, you tend to focus on the particular types of questions that crop up rather than the concept(s) behind them. Just a tiny little tweak and you may find yourself panicking because you haven’t been “prepared” for that question. No, exams are not supposed to be predictable and no, you’re only panicking because you don’...

Starting this week, I'll try to write a somewhat long blog post every Saturday.  Mostly about studying maths, preparing for exams and so on, but may also include tips on taking care of yourself during the exam season.  We never know. Let me know if you have any suggestions! c: How to study maths Have you ever spent sooooo much time revising for a test without making any progress? Have you ever felt that maths is too hard and you can never know maths well? Have you ever had false confidence the day before the test that you could answer virtually everything but couldn’t recall anything on the day of the test? This post aims to make your study sessions more effective and eventually increase your confidence in maths.   Disclaimer: I’ve tried all of the methods I outlined in the upcoming sections but it doesn’t mean the tricks that work for me would work for you. If you’ve had a study method that you’re happy with, perhaps read this article for inspiration. If you aren’t happ...