Ellen Nilsson, who is a former IBDP student, has kindly agreed to share with you these examples from her IB2 topic overview notes. This is to help remind you that you need to stay focused on each subject’s syllabus during your revise for your final exams, as well as to notice how important it is to use active revision techniques in an organized way, as opposed to passively revising by simply reading or taking a few disorganized notes. Finally, you’ll notice that Ellen’s notes show a care for detail, picking up ‘the most important points’ is often what leads to under-achievement, as it leads to skipping over, or underestimating, how much detail you need to remember, in order to get a good grade.
SPANISH CIVIL WAR
SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Human health and Physiology
Neurobiology and Behaviour
MAKE A REVISION TIMETABLE
ELENI VARDAKI: Hi guys this is Eleni from elenivardaki.com, and today I’m talking with Ellen Nilsson who is currently in her 3rd year of university in Australia. She’s going to be sharing with you tips for how to revise effectively for your IB exams, and her story of transitioning through the IB diploma to uni life. Ellen, welcome! Thank you for being here.
ELLEN SOFIA NILSSON: Thank you so much for having me.
ELENI VARDAKI: So would you like to tell our audience a bit about your story and how you got to where you’re at now in Australia?
ELLEN SOFIA NILSSON: Yes, absolutely. I graduated in 2015 and I did the IB back home in Sweden. I always knew that I wanted to study abroad, but I didn’t know exactly where. And I had some family and friends who suggested to go to Australia. So I went here to check it out, and in 2016 I moved to university. So I’m currently in my 3rd year and I’m studying a Bachelor of Arts, double majoring in both History and International Relations.
ELENI VARDAKI: Tell us a bit about how you organize your revision timetable.
ELLEN SOFIA NILSSON: So before the exams, I started studying about 2 months beforehand. And I made a schedule for myself where I have studied every single day, except Tuesday afternoon. I made a really strict schedule of exactly how I was going to plan to study in order to maximize my ability to pull the exam off. I started revising on the 1st day of March. That was, however, dependent on the fact that I made a schedule and I’d figured out exactly how many days I would need to put into learning all of the things that I needed to know. So it’s more about figuring out – first you have to figure out what you need to learn, how you learn it the best, and then from there structure it up. And I would probably suggest going backwards, so you find the day when your exams, and then figure out how many days you need, and how much time you need backwards from that, in order to make a perfect study schedule for yourself. Because you want to give yourself a lot of time.
NOTES AND MIND MAPS
ELENI VARDAKI: Did you, for example, split up the pages into different days of when you’d cover each page, or did you split up in terms of topics of what topics you would have for each day, in your revision schedule?
ELLEN SOFIA NILSSON: I split it up in topics. I took the Subject Outline, which very clearly states every single learning aspect you need to learn for every single topic. And I re-wrote that into an individual bubble, which will be visible in the mind map that is included in the description. And for the First World War, for example, my history subject, I spit it up in years. So I started in 1914, and there I outlined the most important events, and then put down different historians and different aspects.
ELENI VARDAKI: Thank you so much for sharing your maps. When I saw them I was so excited, I was like “Oh my goodness!” The level of detail and focus that you can see, you know, how focused you were from and how detailed and how thorough your mind maps are. And I felt like I was so excited that you were happy to share these with people. So I’m gonna include some links in the description box below, you know definitely, make sure to check those out. Because something that’s important as well to note is, you know, other than just the strategy of using a mind map for the revision, it’s how you use it and how much detail and connection you have between the mind map and the syllabus that also matters, so that you’re then preparing for the questions. And you’ll see that very clearly in these mind maps that Ellen has kindly shared with us. So thanks for that, Ellen.
ELLEN SOFIA NILSSON: No worries. I also think that it’s very important that you continually refer to the syllabus, in order to make sure that you do cover all of the aspects what they actually asking for you, and that’s what I did with my mind maps.
ELENI VARDAKI: Awesome lovely, lovely. And that’s a really important reminder to be revising through with the syllabus as your key and organizing tool and guide, rather than just kind of going through textbooks randomly and hoping for the best or answering questions, without triangulating back to the syllabus. So awesome, thanks for reminding people about that, that’s super useful. Now before we wrap up there’s one more question that I’d like to ask. What is it that you wish you knew or you wish someone had told you at the time?
ELLEN SOFIA NILSSON: I think the best piece of advice we received a week before exams, and it was a teacher telling us that: “Remember to put as much effort as you can into exams and doing your very best, but also remember that in the end, you’re so much more, as a person, than that grade you get”. And I think that in the stress of preparing for exams, all your teachers will be on your back trying to tell you to do all the revision, and stressing you out about the importance of exams, and they are important – you should do your very best. But at the same time, you shouldn’t let that distract you from the fact that you need to look after yourself as well, and realize that you’re so much more than just that grade in the end.
THE IB DIPLOMA IS HARDER THAN UNIVERSITY
ELENI VARDAKI: Ellen, is there anything else that you’d like to add before we wrap up?
ELLEN SOFIA NILSSON: I would like to point out how tough and challenging IB is.
Personally for me, it’s probably been the toughest thing, even though I’m in my 3rd year of uni.
So what I found after IB is that uni will never be as challenging. The workload is a lot easier, at uni. You have less to do. You have exams and you finish them up one subject at a time and then you move on to the next one, instead of doing them all simultaneously, as you would do in IB.
And I also find that when you have all of the skills that you learn and gain in IB, uni is a little easier for you. A lot of my peers right now in 3rd year of university still struggle and find some of the lecture contents difficult. Whereas I’m finding that even though I’m in my 3rd year, a lot of the things that I learn now is the things that I already knew from IB.
IB is going to be tough, but it’s definitely worth it and the knowledge and the skill set that you’ll gain from it are definitely very valuable to you in the university and I’m grateful that I did it.