The student we met
She was halfway through DP1 with a predicted 5 in Math AA HL. Her school's mock papers came back full of small errors that compounded. She had stopped raising her hand in class. Her parents had been told by another tutor that HL was not the right choice and she should drop to SL. She did not want to drop. Neither did we.
What we found
Two diagnostic sessions revealed the issue. The fundamentals from MYP, particularly algebraic manipulation and trigonometric identities, were patchy. She was building HL Math on a foundation that had air pockets. The patch work classroom approach was making it worse by adding new content on top of old gaps.
The plan
We rebuilt the foundation explicitly. Three weeks on the algebra and trig the IB assumes students remember from MYP. We did not move on from a topic until she could explain it without notes. Then we returned to the DP1 syllabus, but with the foundation now solid. Every session ended with a rubric aligned mini mock, marked the way the IB will.
What changed in the marks
By the end of DP1 her school mocks showed a 6. Her predicted grade moved from a 5 to a 6 in February. By DP2 mock exam season she was scoring solid 7s on past papers. The IB exam returned a 7. More importantly, she stopped doubting herself in class.
Where she is now
Engineering at the National University of Singapore, with a partial scholarship. She told us in the post DP review that the moment things changed was not the marks. It was the moment she realised the IB rubric had patterns, and the patterns could be learned. That is the moment we work for, every time.
“The way Math AA was finally explained, that was what changed everything. I stopped being afraid of the paper.”