What IB Students Actually Ask on Reddit, and Honest Answers From Our Tutors

Spend an hour reading r/IBO, the largest online gathering of Diploma Programme students, and a pattern shows up quickly. Behind all the jokes about sleepless nights and brutal maths papers, students keep circling back to the same small set of real questions. We went through a year of the busiest threads and grouped what students are genuinely unsure about. Below are those recurring questions, along with the answers our tutors give every week.

1Which subjects should I take, and how many should be Higher Level?

This is comfortably the most asked question, and it usually arrives as a list of six subjects with the words “is this combination good” attached. Our answer starts from the destination rather than the timetable. Work backwards from the courses and countries you might apply to, because medicine, engineering, economics and architecture all have specific Higher Level requirements, and a missing HL subject is much harder to fix in DP2 than in DP1. After requirements are covered, choose based on where you can sustain effort for two years, not on which combination sounds most impressive. Students who pick the reputedly hardest set of subjects for status almost always regret it by the time internal assessments and the extended essay land in the same month.

2I start DP1 soon. How should I prepare?

Students ask this every summer, usually planning to pre-learn an entire syllabus. That is rarely what pays off. What pays off is arriving with the mechanics in place: fluent algebra if you are heading into either maths course, comfortable academic reading and writing speed for the language and humanities subjects, and a note-taking system you will actually keep using in week nine when things get busy.

It also helps enormously to understand how the diploma is scored before your first lesson: six subjects marked out of seven, plus up to three points from the extended essay and theory of knowledge combination. Knowing that coursework carries real weight changes how seriously you treat the first term instead of treating it as a warm-up.

3How do people actually get 7s?

Every “ask me anything” thread from a high scorer attracts the same request for a secret method, and the answers are strikingly consistent. The students who score well practise under exam conditions with past papers, then mark their own work against the published criteria until they can predict what an examiner will reward. They learn what command terms such as evaluate, discuss and justify actually require, because a perfect answer to the wrong instruction still loses marks. They use active recall and spaced review rather than rereading notes, and they hand work in early enough to get feedback while there is still time to use it.

4How far back should I go with past papers?

A frequent worry, especially in subjects with a new syllabus and only a couple of recent sessions available. Start with papers from the current syllabus, since they reflect the current style and content. Then use older papers selectively for topics that have not changed, treating them as question banks rather than as full mock exams. What matters more than volume is the review afterwards: reading the markscheme, understanding why marks were awarded, and rewriting weak answers.

5Why do the extended essay and the internal assessments go wrong?

The questions here are almost never about writing ability. They are about scope. Research questions that are too broad, topics chosen because they sounded interesting rather than because data or sources were available, and drafts started far too late are the three recurring problems. Choose a question narrow enough to answer properly in the word count, confirm you can access the sources or data before you commit, and build your timeline around your school internal deadlines rather than the final submission date. Also read your school policy on the use of artificial intelligence tools carefully, because academic honesty investigations are a genuinely serious outcome that students underestimate.

6Is the IB really as hard as everyone says?

Threads asking whether the diploma is survivable, or whether a student is already too far behind, appear constantly. Our honest answer is that the difficulty is rarely the individual content. It is the concurrency: several coursework deadlines, plus theory of knowledge, plus creativity activity service, plus exam revision, all overlapping. Students who cope are not more intelligent than the ones who struggle. They plan in weeks rather than days, they protect sleep, and they ask for help early instead of after the deadline has passed.

7What about predicted grades, remarks and retakes?

These questions spike twice a year, around results and around university offers. Predicted grades are produced by your teachers from evidence they already hold, which means mocks, internal assessments and classwork are the levers you can actually influence. If a result looks inconsistent with your work, a remark, formally an enquiry upon results, has to be requested through your school within a limited window, so speak to your coordinator immediately rather than waiting. Retakes are possible in a later session, and many universities accept them, but policies vary by institution, so check with the university before making plans.

8Which resources and grading tools can I trust?

Students increasingly ask whether third party graders, including artificial intelligence tools that claim to score an internal assessment, are accurate. Treat these with caution. They can be useful for a rough structural check, but they do not apply the criteria the way a trained examiner does, and confident feedback that is wrong is worse than no feedback. The reliable materials remain the official subject guides, past papers and markschemes supplied through your school, and detailed comments from a teacher or tutor who marks against the criteria.

Where we come in

Almost every question above has the same underlying request: someone who knows the criteria, has seen many candidates go through the same two years, and can tell a student what to prioritise this week. That is exactly what our tutors at IB Scholarz do, across IB Diploma subjects at both Standard and Higher Level, alongside IGCSE, AP and SAT preparation. If any of these questions sounded like yours, book a free trial lesson and bring your current work, your predicted grades or your extended essay draft, and we will start from there.