The six-week past-paper plan that actually moves an IB grade

There is a version of past-paper practice that feels productive and changes nothing: you open a paper, work through the questions you can already do, check the answers, feel broadly fine, and close it. Six weeks of that will raise a grade by roughly nothing. The difference between practice that works and practice that doesn't is not effort — it is what you do with the questions you got wrong.

The plan below is what we run with Year 13 students in the six weeks before the May session. It assumes you have finished teaching content, that you have access to at least four years of papers with mark schemes, and that you can find six to eight focused hours a week per subject. Compress it if you have less time; the order matters more than the duration.

Week 1 — one paper, untimed, with the syllabus open

Start with a diagnostic, not a test. Take a full paper from three or four years ago and work through it with no clock and with the subject guide open next to you. You are not measuring yourself; you are producing a list. Every time you hesitate, look something up, or guess, write the syllabus statement it came from in a separate document.

By the end of the paper you should have between fifteen and forty syllabus points on that list. That list — not the score — is the output of week one. Students who skip this step spend the next five weeks practising the things they were already good at, because those are the questions that feel nice to do.

Week 2 — close the content gaps, in the smallest possible units

Take the list and work down it. For each item, the goal is a single, specific repair: re-read the relevant two pages, do three questions that target only that idea, and write yourself two lines explaining it as if to a classmate. Two lines, not a page — if you cannot compress it into two lines you have not understood it yet, and that is useful information.

Expect to close about two-thirds of the list in this week. The remaining third is usually not content at all: it is technique, and weeks three to five are for that.

Week 3 — timed sections, not timed papers

Full timed papers are exhausting and low-resolution: you finish, you score 62%, and you know almost nothing about why. Instead, take sections. Give yourself the real per-mark time allowance — roughly a minute a mark in most IB subjects — and do twenty-five minutes at a stretch. Stop, mark it immediately, and annotate.

• Mark against the published mark scheme, not against what you meant.
• Write the reason for every lost mark in the margin: content, misread, method shown but not stated, or ran out of time.
• Tally those four categories weekly. The tally is the plan for the following week.

That tally is quietly the most valuable artefact in this whole process. Most students assume their lost marks are content, and for most students by week three they are not — they are misreads and unstated method. Those are far cheaper to fix, which is good news, but only if you know that is what is happening.

Week 4 — command terms and the second half of the paper

IB questions are written against command terms, and the command term tells you the shape of the answer. "State" wants a sentence. "Explain" wants a causal chain. "Evaluate" wants both sides and a judgement, and loses marks without the judgement. Spend one session per subject doing nothing but reading questions and writing the first line of the answer — no full answers — until the command term automatically sets the structure.

Also: deliberately practise the back half of the paper. Fatigue is real and question difficulty is usually loaded towards the end, so the questions you are worst at are the ones you meet when you are least able to do them. Doing the last section first, once a week, is an unglamorous trick that reliably picks up marks.

Week 5 — two full papers under real conditions

Now do the full thing, properly: correct time, no notes, no phone, no restarts, in one sitting. Two papers is enough. The point of these is not content — it is stamina, pacing and the discovery that you always spend nine minutes too long on the same kind of question.

Mark them yourself first, then have them marked by someone else. Self-marking is systematically generous, and the gap between your mark and a teacher's mark is itself a number worth knowing before the exam rather than after it.

Week 6 — narrow, don't broaden

The last week is not for new material. Take the four-category tally, pick the three biggest recurring errors per subject, and drill only those. Re-read your own two-line explanations from week two. Sleep properly, which does more for recall than the extra hour does.

The students who gain two points in the last six weeks are almost never the ones who did the most papers. They are the ones who did the fewest papers properly.

TYCHR Year 13 revision programme

What to do if you have three weeks, not six

Run weeks one, three and six. The diagnostic is non-negotiable — without it you are guessing at what to practise — and the error tally is what turns three weeks of practice into a plan. Drop the content-repair week and accept that you will go into the exam with a small number of known gaps, which is a much better position than an unknown number of unknown ones.