Our guide to surviving IB Geo:
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1. Read widely
The beauty of the Geo essays is that you can use any case study in the world, and you don't need to limit yourself to those you have learned in class. Our Geo teacher created a system called the Article Child — for every lesson, a different student would be tasked with finding a news article linking to any part of the IB Geo syllabus. Everyone would then make links between the issues presented in the article and the core IB Geo concepts (power, places, processes, possibilities, scale, spatial interactions) or the SDGs. A system like this amongst your peers would help you keep updated.
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2. The syllabus guide is your Bible
The Geo syllabus guide from the IB (which your teachers will give you access to/you can find online) has a list of everything you need to know for the exams. When we were revising, we'd always check the guide to make sure we didn't leave any gaps. Make sure the syllabus guide is up to date because the IB refreshes it every few years.
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3. Essay plans and timed practice
The IB Geo exams are quite demanding in that they expect high quality essays in a very short period of time. Creating essay plans in advance (and revising them consistently) will keep concepts and evidence fresh in your mind, such that when you're presented with the exam questions, arguments will come to you naturally, making writing a lot easier. It's also good to practise writing essays under timed conditions to get yourself used to the demands of the exam.
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4. Use case studies familiar to you
It's a tall order to remember so much case study information about places you're not too familiar with - so using examples that you're familiar with will be a great help in the exams. As both of us are Singaporeans we'd use SG as our case study for most of the Urban Environments units. Similarly, the Kpop fans in our class would use BTS as their example for culture-related Paper 3 exam questions.
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5. Mind-mapping
Paper 3 exam questions require you to draw upon (and synthesise!!) multiple syllabus points (across Units 4-6, and to an extent also 1-3) to achieve the top band. Right before the exams, our class conducted a mind-mapping exercise where we'd make links between all the units. This helped us a lot as we consequently had better knowledge of how we could synthesise different IB Geo concepts across the 6 Units.
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6. Past-papers and spaced revision
You've probably heard this too many times but it truly is solid advice. For short-answer questions, the mark schemes can sometimes be very unreasonable by accepting only a fixed number of responses - so in some cases your answer could be correct (using logic and common sense) yet wrong (because, strictly speaking, the mark scheme does not include it). To prevent this frustrating, unnecessary loss of marks, familiarising yourself with the responses included in the mark scheme is advisable. After all, there is an element of predictability with these questions in that they typically repeat themselves. Spaced revision using your method of choice (active recall/flashcards/Cornell etc.) also helps with long-term retention of info, which is really important considering how much stuff you need to know for the exams.
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7. Learn from example
For all our essay-based subjects, we found that referencing model essays was a great way to emulate good structure, evidence, synthesis and evaluation etc. If you manage to get hold of some of your seniors' essays that'd be great (especially with your teacher's marking to understand their marking style/requirements)
Good luck <3,
KR and Chloe
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