How to score a 7 in Maths HL

My question is simple : how did you study for your Maths HL exam?
What is the best preparation technique?

What books do you recommend?

Any advice from "seveners"?

Reply 1

User935047

any guidelines people? help me!

Reply 2

geekly

Hi,
I did my IB HL maths exams several months ago and haven't got my grades yet, but in the meantime here is what happened to me incase you find it useful:

1) September - did no maths
2) IB mock exams January - almost didn't prepare ("maths is easy") and got a 4.
3) Following this wake up call, did maths straight for one whole month before the exams.
4) Sat the exam without any major problems.

The key thing in HL maths is practice, and recognition of its importance.

I literally read over all my notes and finished the revision part in one day, and then spent one month doing practice papers. From 2007 - 2011, 3 sets of papers for each year. Over, and over, and over again.

My revision prior to the exams was literally 90% maths, 10% other 5 subjects.

However this is because I'm a computer science person so maths was really the only subject that matters to me :smile:

It was hardcore... Fingers crossed.

Reply 3

geekly

Original post by TrysBaldai

What books do you recommend?

There are no books in particular I'd recommend - I just got through my huge Roberts & MacKenzie IB HL maths textbook during the year but didn't really use it for anything other than learning the theory.

And trust me, when you're learning the theory it feels easy. It's the practice which is the difficult bit... The textbooks are never, ever anywhere as hard as the papers.

Reply 4

geekly

Original post by TrysBaldai

Any advice from "seveners"?

Btw, results came out today and I did indeed get a 7. :tongue:

So now you can take what I said seriously :smile:

thank u!

Original post by TrysBaldai

My question is simple : how did you study for your Maths HL exam?
What is the best preparation technique?

What books do you recommend?

Any advice from "seveners"?

It's really important to understand concepts as opposed to memorising steps/formulas. I had two books that I would use and I'd also use other resources like khanacademy videos- having things explained in slightly different ways is great. Exam questions need you to be creative at times and you need to understand things completely to do this.
Make sure at one point you go through the syllabus as well because I remember doing that quite near the exams and being a little surprised at random things I was supposed to know that I had not paid much attention to. Get to know your formula book really well. Don't study without it!

Also, past exam papers are incredibly important- you'll get used to the style and notice what kinds of things generally come up. Sometimes questions are just repeated with different numbers. And if course, mark yourself true to the markscheme- you'll see that showing every step is important as you might not get all the marks if you don't.

It may sound stupid but try to enjoy it as well. It's much easier to do well in a subject you enjoy :smile:

. That goes for all subjects really

Reply 7

MAMDS1993

Do a lot a lot of past papers..trust me when I say questions do have a tendency to repeat from really old papers. And yeah just familiarise yourself with the concepts in every topic and try out questions from the past papers. Personally, I never studied by topic, but its a good idea to do so. I used to do past papers and grade myself and that made me get my 7 :smile:

Reply 8

WhisperOfLove

Original post by MAMDS1993

You are my new source of inspiration!! lol

Reply 9

hin1994

It's not really that hard to get a 7 in maths HL, speaking from experience as a 'sevener' if you will. Subjects like english and history (especially at HL) are much more subjective, and therefore much more prone to erratic marking. In contrast, maths has an objective markscheme and it is comforting to know that if you get an answer right you get all the marks, (esp if it is a 'show that').

Just keep doing past papers and **understand** what you are doing. Do not rote learn formulas and apply them blindly without intuition or knowledge, as that is a recipe for disaster.

Do past papers until you hit three successive comfortable 7s, 'comfortable' as in 10+ marks over the 7 boundary. That is the time where you should stop revising, as maths is only one subject after all.

Reply 10

FiniteMr

Past papers are the absolute key. Find EVERY past paper ever, and do each, timed. You go through them carefully with the mark scheme and write a LIST of things you got wrong. You go over relevant theory and try the question again. You write down your little lists of tricks and things you need to make sure you remember. You get absolutely familiar with the data book - you use it in every paper you do. Once you've done this, you do the past papers again, and again, and again, until you're getting 90%+ every time. Then you're in a position to be confident about a 7, because the questions will not repeat exactly, but they will always be similar and be asking you to do the same thing, in a different way.

Of course, this was kind of over the top, because I spent about 5 months stressing about reaching 776 in my HLs for my offer last year. But it will see you through if you do it :wink:

Definitely do lots of past papers and REALLY concentrate on the marking and actually make sure you sort out in your head the things you did wrong, otherwise the learning process will take a lot longer.

Learn some derivations of your formulae, if you want to help yourself even more - being able to work backwards algebraically from the formula in the correct way, or recognising things that simplify down to a formula in your data book, is an invaluable skill that you can help your question speed and may even help you complete a question that would otherwise stump you because you haven't worked on something in a certain way before. This is particularly true with trig formulae-they connect in really weird ways and something complex often simplifies down-if you've looked at derivations, and played around with the relations a lot, you should recognise them and give yourself an edge.