IB Study Tips: Balancing Six Subjects, TOK, CAS and the Extended Essay

Map the two-year deadline landscape early

In the first term of DP1, put every known internal assessment, extended essay checkpoint, TOK deadline and mock date on one calendar. The clusters will be obvious immediately, and they are usually in the same places each year: late DP1 for several IAs, and the first term of DP2 for the extended essay and remaining IAs.

Then work backwards from each deadline with intermediate dates. An IA is not one task; it is a proposal, a data collection or reading phase, an analysis, a draft, feedback and a final version. Only the first of those can be started today, which is precisely why mapping helps.

Internal assessments: finish early, not well-late

IAs typically carry around 20 to 25 percent of a subject grade, and the marginal return on the final polish is small compared with the cost of having three IAs overdue simultaneously. Aim to submit each first draft ahead of the school deadline so feedback arrives while there is still time to act on it.

Choose narrow research questions. The single most common IA problem is scope: an ambitious question produces unmanageable data and a thin analysis, while a modest question analysed thoroughly scores well.

• Narrow the question until it can be answered in the word limit.
• Read the subject's IA criteria before starting, not before submitting.
• Get one round of teacher feedback on a genuine draft, not an outline.
• Keep a reference list from the first day of research.

The extended essay

Four thousand words written in the final fortnight is visible to examiners. The essays that score well are usually those where reading finished early and the argument had time to change during drafting.

A reliable timeline: subject and rough topic before the end of DP1, research question and reading list over the summer, reading and note-taking in the first weeks of DP2, full draft before the winter break, revision after supervisor feedback. Each stage is small; the essay only becomes overwhelming when they compress.

TOK and CAS without letting them expand

TOK rewards specific, well-chosen examples over abstract argument. Keep a running document of real examples from your other subjects — a disputed historical interpretation, a scientific model that was replaced, a mathematical proof — and TOK essays and exhibitions become far quicker to write.

CAS is not academically assessed but it is a completion requirement, and it fails students who leave the reflections until the end. Write each reflection within a week of the activity; ten minutes then saves a weekend later.

Revising for the final exams

Final exams still carry the majority of your points, and the risk in the IB is that coursework consumes so much of DP2 that content revision starts far too late. Protect a weekly content-revision slot per subject from the start of DP2, even during IA season.

Use the subject guides and past papers, paying attention to command terms, which the IB defines explicitly. Answering 'evaluate' as though it said 'describe' is a predictable and entirely avoidable loss of marks across every subject.

Common mistakes

Perfecting an IA that is already in the top band while another sits unstarted is the classic IB time-allocation error. Points are gained by finishing everything to a good standard, not by polishing one thing.

The other frequent mistake is treating higher-level subjects as merely 'more content'. They demand more depth of analysis, which needs practice on past questions rather than extra reading.