Reddit reviews IB Geography: Study Guide: Oxford IB Diploma Program

I can say that Geography isn't very hard (at least in my experience), whether catching up or not. Looking at the Econ syllabus, I think Geography is easier.

For clarity: last year I finished Geography SL and Math Studies with 6s in both (predicted at a 7 in Studies, but... oops.) This year I'm doing my other four subjects: English A Literature HL, French B HL, Spanish B HL, and Exercise Science (I assume that's what you mean by Sports Science?) SL.

Advice #1: for Geography at least, look into buying the study guide. (e.g. http://www.amazon.ca/IB-Geography-Study-Garrett-Nagle/dp/0198389159, but it's expensive new so look into buying used.) It's your best friend for catching up + studying ahead because it tells you what you need to know, the basics at least.

Advice #2: Focus on learning vocabulary + grammar in Spanish right now. AB Initio (if I remember correctly) is meant for those with no prior knowledge of the language, which means that joining half a year late, you're going to need to catch up on that. Not IB-specific, but this website is decent. http://studyspanish.com/

Advice #3: Ask your teachers to provide a list of topics covered in each subject. It shouldn't be too much to ask. Just a simple list, like for Math Studies it could look like "Unit 1 Functions, Unit 2 Trigonometry..." etc. This will tell you what you need to catch up on.

Advice #4: For Exercise Science, these quizzes (again not IB specific, but we use them nonetheless) contain similar material albeit in different unit numbers. http://thompsonbooks.com/exercisescience/bellringer_pages/bellringers.htm

Advice #5: If for some reason you don't have the IB-specific textbooks for your courses (I'm not sure if English Lang & Lit has one, but if it does it's included) find a way to get them. Study them because they will be your best friends.

If you need help with anything more specific (question on topics, help, so on) for English/Spanish/Studies/Exercise Science/Geo (if you switch), feel free to message me.

Personally, I really like the Cambridge University Press ones, like this one for Chemistry. I only have them for Chemistry and Physics but they're much better than the Oxford ones in my opinion. I also like it because my school use the Oxford IB Diploma Programme Textbooks to teach the course in the first place, and having a study guide with a different brand to the textbook has been really useful for me to find extra examples of questions or different ways of explaining topics that I may not have wholly understood in the main textbook.



For Geography, I use this study guide, though I don't really know if it's the best one because we got lent them by the school. I think it's pretty good, but maybe there is a better one out there.


I don't think you really need them for the other subjects - you can always buy individual study guides for the books you study for English or, if you have to buy the books themselves, try and get the 'Methuen Student Edition' because it has lots of information at the beginning of the book. For French, you could buy a vocabulary book like this or a grammar book, like this, but there's loads on the internet anyway so I wouldn't worry about it too much.



And for Maths, I don't think a study guide will be that useful, as I think the main thing is practice, practice, practice!




Oh, and maybe hold off on buying anything just yet (especially for Chemistry and Physics) - the IB really like messing around with the syllabus and it won't be that useful to have an outdated version of a study guide