Hi! My name is Diya and I am currently a full ib student finishing up by first year in the IB Diploma program. One of the courses I am taking is Chemistry HL, which stands for “higher level” and is a first-year university course. Personally, chemistry has never been my best subject and I’ve always found myself struggling so much in it. I am not entirely sure if I’m the best person to give advice, but I’ve definitely learned a lot about handling it as I’m currently taking it and somewhat surviving now. Here are 3 tips I wish someone told me before I started!
- Develop a strong foundation of core chemistry concepts
If you are starting chemistry IB right after taking chemistry 20, you need to be prepared. By “prepared”, I mean you need to fully understand all of your chemistry 20 material. Without a strong foundation in it, you will struggle in chemistry without it. I don’t want to scare you of course, but I do recommend that before you start IB chemistry you must take some time to review key concepts. You should also not forget about labs. You have to be able to deal with lab write-ups and doing multiple experiments accurately too. I’ve never been really great with labs (both doing and the write-up) and I thought it wasn’t that big of an issue until before I started IB chem. Basically I would say to just make sure to have a solid foundation in both theory and practical information.
2. Develop your speed + accuracy
One of the biggest issues I had was starting out with exam timing. What I mean by this is that you get 1.5 minutes per question. This may seem like a lot but when IB style questions are thrown at you and it takes longer to understand the question than actually answering it, it is such an important skill to be able to process information quickly and accurately. You need to be able to understand what the question is asking and how to use the information you are provided with to answer the question. The only way (from what I know) to get better at this is to practice. Practice so much that you know what to do when you see any question type. The exam can only test one concept in so many different ways so use that to your advantage. When you are practicing one thing I would recommend doing is timing yourself to figure out which question types are costing you the most time. If you are doing 10 questions you can put a timer for 15 minutes, but one really good tip one of my friend’s told me is to reduce the timer 3-5 minutes less so it properly simulates exam conditions. Like during the test you will probably be pretty nervous and won’t be as comfortable as you are at home, so if you can answer the questions correctly under even harsher time constraints you should definitely be good to go.
3. Find good practice material
Your textbook is your best friend. Personally, I have never really been a fan of using textbooks and I usually did pretty well just doing assignments given in class, but once you enter this (or any ib class really), you need to utilise your textbook as much as you can. It explains concepts in a different way than your teacher did and sometimes that can really help engrave the information in your brain. Like I said earlier, practice is key to doing well however you need to be using IB style questions. When you’re first starting out in chem ib, it can honestly be pretty tough to find IB questions for the very niche topic your teacher is teaching, therefore I think a great resource is AI. Whether you’re a fan of Chatgpt, Gemini, or whatever you use, one thing I like to do is upload my notes for whatever topic my quiz/test is on and ask it to make hard ib-style questions. This is helpful maybe like 75% of the time, but then again it is AI so it will never really be as accurate as the question types you will come across on the test. However I would still recommend it as it’s better than nothing as it also helps explain concepts really well. I know that at school sometimes when a student doesn’t understand a concept they might feel shy to ask the teacher more than once to explain it, and in this case AI can be your best friend. Other than the textbook and AI, you can also search on specific websites such as “Revision Dojo” as it also has practice questions too. Overall it doesn’t matter what you use as long as you specifically practice IB style questions under time constraints.
As someone who is not the best at chem, I think that those were the three main tips that I would give to someone starting out in chemistry in IB and dealing with the massive transition!