Free IB & IGCSE Resources

• Your school's subject guides. Every IB subject has a published guide setting out exactly what is assessed and how. Most students never read it. It is the single most useful document available to them.
• Command term lists. The IB publishes definitions of every command term. Learning them is possibly the highest-return hour a Diploma student can spend.
• Past papers and mark schemes from your school or the board. Papers without mark schemes are of limited use — the mark scheme is where the learning is.
• Examiner reports. Rarely read and unusually candid about what candidates got wrong that year.

1. Timed, in one sitting. An untimed paper tests knowledge; a timed one tests the thing the exam tests.
2. Mark it yourself, against the mark scheme. The marking is where the learning happens. Handing it to someone else removes the useful part.
3. Categorise every lost mark as content not known, technique, or careless. Three different problems with three different fixes — and most students discover that far fewer of their errors are "careless" than they assumed.
4. Redo the wrong questions a week later. Not the same day, when the answer is still in memory.

Re-reading notes and highlighting feel productive and do very little. What works is retrieval — closing the book and writing down what you remember — and spacing that retrieval out over weeks. It feels harder and less pleasant, which is exactly why students avoid it.

The practical version: turn each topic into questions rather than notes, and answer them from memory on a schedule.