Andrew's IB Maths Vault

Hey there kiddos!   N23s, good job! Enjoy your break before uni starts!! M24s, be ready. Your school may have mocks around this time or early next year, this is the time to make a difference!   I just realised I have a couple flashy torture devices unit tests in my vault ready to go, and today let’s do a bit of vectors. QP: MS:      

Hey y'all! I've been pretty quiet lately - as predicted uni work really  caught up with me and I'm constantly running against the clock. This post is NOT intended for students. It's intended for teachers who are interested in different ways of thinking about summative  assessments as well as public examinations. We're going big here. That being said, I've finally finished reading one of my favourite papers from Dylan Wiliam, a key figure in assessment research, and spent a bit of time digesting what I've read. The paper is titled "Quality in assessment: The meaning and consequences of standards". It should be available for free, online, on Research Gate, but of course you can get your hands on it elsewhere. This is my first time sharing my research notes with y'all, so let me know how it goes. Instead of making this post dreadfully long, I've put the link to the google docs with the summary here . Enjoy! N23 students:  may the odds be ever ...

Hey y’all.   Just under 7 weeks and N23s are gonna take their final IB exams. Y’all are about to become members of the old people gang, congrats!   I noticed that I already posted Unit Tests v2 for all of trigonometry except trigonometric relationships, so now’s the time to correct that. As usual, there’s considerable challenge (I hope) at the top end, especially the time pressure, but students of all abilities have opportunities to show off what they know.   Some quick words before we get to the tests.   1) November 2023 mocks N23 mocks will be coming next weekend! Buckle up, we’re preparing for takeoff.   RShields is proofing the paper a 2 nd round before they’re sent off to y’all.   AASL, I think the papers reflect the difficulty of the actual papers. AAHL, they’re definitely on the harder end, especially Paper 3.   (Speaking of that I gotta start writing the MS too oop-)   2) Revision Sessions (on IB Discord) As exams are quick approaching ...

Hello! Three weeks of AFK and now I'm back with another set of unit tests! I'm working with RS and others to grind out as much stuff for y'all as possible. c: Today I'm back with binomial expansion and binomial distributions (alongside normal distributions!) - without any further ado, here ya go! AASL: AASL Answers: AAHL: AASL Answers:

Hey there DP2s! For many of you school’s about to start in a week or two. If you have taken a fair mathematical sabbatical, perhaps this is time to prepare yourself for the new school year. I’m not a fan of studying from dawn till dusk every day, but the more work you could do now the more your future self will thank you when January hits.   Today we’ll be back with complex numbers. Similar to integration, complex numbers are not conceptually demanding but rather seasoned question writers love to weave other parts of the curriculum – trigonometric relationships, vectors, integration, you name it. Enjoy the complexity of your complex numbers!

Hello hoomans. My long-time readers may have noticed that I tend to take all of us on a tangent every so often. And today happens to be one of those days.   If you hang out with me on the IB Discord server this is not the first time I babble on designing and writing examinations. You know how happy I am to talk about these nerdy things. I wrote two posts on how I write exams, which you could find here and here . Today we’ll take a crucial aspect – question difficulty – and dive deeper into what makes up the difficulty of a question.   This is my attempt to distill some of the research I’ve read in a more user-friendly, digestible way. Perhaps not the most accurate but hopefully they serve as a checklist for question writers to be cognizant of when they’re writing questions for a mock exam.   Note that this does NOT apply to formative assessments; the purpose is different and therefore you shouldn’t apply what’s written here word by word. And if you’re no...

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Summer before IB, submitting your subject choice: aIsL iS sO eASy iMmA gEt a 45 Summer before DP2, looking at uni requirements: oh FUCK me no uni accepts this bird course!   Panik panik panik. Proceed to ask (read: beg) the coordinator to move you to AASL to get into the major you want to pursue. They raise their eyebrows, looking a little suspicious, really doubt if you could make it. But most likely they’re gonna say yes. You’ve got their green light, jumping in joy. September comes by, you see “the chain rule” on the board and proceed to read it as hieroglyphs.   Welcome to AASL.   Getting their permission is the first step. Now the hard part arrives: how to catch up with your classmates and how to come across as not totally out of your depth.   Today’s post focuses on the transition from AISL to AASL. The key things you should know to make the transition a little less bumpy.   (1) difference...