if you're taking IB please reply

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History was probably my heaviest revision load, just because there are so many statistics you gotta know. The exact way I organised varied slightly between paper to paper, but it largely revolved around factors. Identify all possible factors in a given topic, find a healthy amount of quantifiable evidence in each (ie statistics). The way these statistics interact with your argument will obviously change with the question, so my advice is to pick out the most significant piece of evidence and just have that locked in your brain at all times. For example, if the question is even slightly related to the rise of the Nazis, the share of Nazi seats/votes in the Reichstag from 1929-1932 is always going to be your friend.

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I practiced essays a decent bit, but I found that it just takes soo much out of you to do a paper 2 or a paper 3. Don't tire yourself out before the exam! Also, its less worth it to do last-minute history past papers, especially if your teacher is a slow marker, since you may not get the feedback back quick enough. My advice is: start now but take it slow! Do a paper 2 or a paper 3 every 2 weeks and ask your teacher for feedback! Paper 1 is shorter and easier to just push out in like a day, and it is important for you to practice the skills that come with answering the questions, especially since question 2 will pop up again in Section A of your IA. If you really want something to hone, I recommend paper 1! It's shorter, it's repeatable (sometimes they even reuse the picture source), and it's still worth a lot! My teacher always said that she knew very few students who got 7s without doing well for paper 1

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I didn't actually use flashcards for history, but I think it could work! My flashcards mainly went into Bio SL for me, but the technique of memorisation is still the same. I would just warn you that the information you retain from the flashcards needs to appear meaningfully in your essays, unlike a science like bio or ess where you just kinda need to put it down on paper to prove you know. In history, that raw information needs to be processed into an explanation of why it matters to your argument. Though, I will say the flashcards could work great for remembering the years of events! that really gets people and definitely got me during mocks.

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English was my lightest revision load, basically consisting of only past papers and familiarising myself with the texts. I really don't think you need to practice essays too much, just enough to get a sense of your essay writing voice and to get a hang of writing clear, active sentences. Always be making a point! Once you think you've got that, you can devote all your time to remembering quotes.

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I will say that I didn't do pure lit! So I don't have experience doing the unseen lit text (though I would have loved to 🙏), but for the unseen langlit text, I always made it a point to be clear. Your argument can be made or broken by how well you lay our your thesis statement.

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I actually split all my revision based on potential themes and techniques. I had a big shared google doc with a table, one for all the themes, the other for all the literary, and we just filled in it with as many quotes as we could. It is a slog but with the questions being so hard to predict we had to do it. Oh, we also had like a character comparison table, where we'd have two characters from each text that we thought filled similar roles (ie, both protagonists, both love interests, both antagonists) and shoved all the significant characterisation and dialogue about them so it would be easy for us to reference them in the exam.

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I totally agree with you! I came out of IB loving the literary texts I studied (1984, Purple Hibiscus, Master Harold and the Boys, A Doll's House, the works of Wilfred Owen, Chronicle of a Death Foretold) because every time I had had a eureka moment or I connected two points I got that rush of ecstasy. Think of every lesson as another chance to try and get that boost of serotonin. It might not be easy, depending on how enthusiastic your class is (mine was super stale) or how receptive they are to the ideals in the text (I've heard some crazy stories about the teacher not agreeing with or totally missing the politics of the text they were talking about), but do your best to be enthusiastic. The more you give, the more you get. (Even if you still only get 6 at the end of the day I shake my fist at the IBO)