IGCSE to IB: five habits to build before Year 1 starts

Students who found IGCSE straightforward are often the ones who struggle most in the first term of the Diploma, and it usually isn't because the content is beyond them. It is because IGCSE rewards a working style — absorb it in class, revise hard for a few weeks, perform — that the Diploma quietly punishes. The IB runs for two years, six subjects, three core components and a stream of deadlines that overlap on purpose.

These five habits are what we ask incoming Year 12 students to build over the summer. None of them are difficult. All of them are much easier to start before the term than during it.

1. Keep one calendar, and put the deadlines on it first

By the end of the first term you will be tracking six subjects' internal deadlines, TOK, CAS and the beginnings of the Extended Essay. Students who track this in their heads discover in November that three things are due in the same week, and by then the only remaining strategy is to do all three badly.

One calendar. Every deadline goes on the day it is set, not the day you remember it. Then work backwards: a draft date a week before, a start date two weeks before that. The IB does not have surprise deadlines; it has deadlines people didn't look at.

2. Take notes you will actually reread

IGCSE notes are usually a transcript of the lesson, which is fine when there are eight months of content. Over two years, a transcript is unusable — nobody rereads four hundred pages. Shift to notes organised by syllabus statement: the statement as a heading, the explanation in your own words underneath, and one worked example.

3. Learn to read a mark scheme

IB marks are awarded against published criteria and mark schemes, and students who read them do systematically better than equally capable students who don't. Get comfortable early: take any past question in a subject you already know, write an answer, then read the mark scheme and work out precisely which of your sentences earned which mark. It is an uncomfortable exercise the first three times and then it changes how you write answers permanently.

4. Start the Extended Essay conversation early — informally

You do not need a research question in August. You do need to notice, over the first term, which subject you keep wanting to read more about. Students who leave the EE topic entirely to the school timetable end up choosing under time pressure in a subject that happened to be convenient, and then spend four thousand words being bored.

Keep a running note of anything that makes you curious — an article, a lab that went strangely, a historical claim you doubted. In February you will have a list to choose from instead of a blank page.

5. Protect one evening a week from school entirely

This one sounds like advice and is actually logistics. The Diploma expands to fill whatever time you give it, and two years is long enough that a pace with no slack in it will break somewhere. Students who ring-fence one evening are, in our experience, the ones still working effectively in March of Year 13.

What not to worry about

Do not pre-learn the syllabus over the summer. It is demoralising, it is usually the wrong emphasis, and the teaching will cover it. If you want to do subject work, do the bridging maths — the algebraic fluency assumed at the start of both IB Mathematics courses is the one genuine content cliff between IGCSE and the Diploma, and a fortnight of practice removes it.