IB Mathematics · Online, one-to-one · AA & AI, SL & HL
An IB Math tutor for Hong Kong families — sessions that land in your evening, not the middle of your night.
Renzo Diaz is an IB Mathematics tutor based in Milan, teaching one-to-one online across all four courses — Analysis and Approaches and Applications and Interpretation, Standard and Higher Level. Milan runs six to seven hours behind Hong Kong, which means a working morning here lands in your child's afternoon and evening — after school, not after midnight. His documented results include a Grade 3 to two Grade 7 papers in IB Math AI SL, and 19 Google reviews averaging 4.9 stars — each independently verifiable. Application-only.
Hong Kong's international-school system is one of the most academically competitive in the world, and the IB cohort inside it is unusually strong: a student who would sit comfortably at a 6 in a less pressured system can find the same grade slipping toward a 5 here, not because the syllabus changed, but because the marking curve is calibrated against a deep, well-prepared field.
The families I work with are usually not short on effort. Hong Kong's academic culture already runs on long hours and high expectations. What is often missing is a weekly system that turns those hours into a specific, trackable gain — rather than more of the same practice against the same blind spot. Hong Kong's IB World Schools — including Diocesan Boys' School and St. Paul's Co-educational College — sit the same syllabus, so the diagnostic applies the same way regardless of which one your child attends.
The unexplained Grade 4: the report says it, nobody can say why.
School reports record outcomes, not causes: a grade, a comment, occasionally a remark about "carelessness." Before any plan is built, I diagnose the exact step where the reasoning broke — whether that step lives in this term's topic or three years back in algebra. That diagnosis, not the report card, is what the weekly work runs on.
AA or AI, SL or HL: the choice, made with half the information.
International schools ask families to commit to a Math course and level while the student has never sat a real IB paper. The choice shapes university options and is expensive to reverse mid-Diploma. I walk families through both courses with real exam questions before the school deadline, including what each university faculty actually requires.
Mid-Diploma transfer: arrived from another curriculum, partway through.
Hong Kong's international-school population is highly mobile, and a student arriving from a different curriculum — or a different IB school — inherits the Diploma clock mid-cycle with gaps shaped by a different syllabus. The first month is structural triage: find where the previous curriculum left holes, rebuild those, and align to the new school's assessment calendar from the next mock onward.
The high-pressure plateau: more hours stopped producing more marks.
A student already doing extra practice, extra classes, extra past papers — and still not moving — rarely needs a fifth source of drilling. The plateau is usually a specific, repeatable error the volume of practice is reinforcing rather than correcting. Naming it precisely is the only way more hours start converting into marks again.
Coverage
All four IB Maths courses. Find the one your child is sitting.
AA and AI are different subjects wearing the same name, and SL and HL are different workloads again. Each has its own page with the situations, syllabus coverage and exam technique specific to it.
What's actually examined
The exam your child is sitting.
AA HL and AI SL are examined differently — knowing the real structure changes how the weekly work is built. Figures below cover AA HL (the most demanding of the four courses) and AI SL (the course in the documented Grade 3→7 case); AA SL and AI HL sit between them and have their own dedicated pages.
| Paper | Duration | Marks | Weight | What it tests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AA HL Paper 1 | 120 minutes, no calculator | 110 marks | 30% | Pure algebraic fluency under time pressure. |
| AA HL Paper 2 | 120 minutes, calculator allowed | 110 marks | 30% | Application and modelling. |
| AA HL Paper 3 | 60 minutes, calculator allowed | 55 marks | 20% | Two extended investigative questions, unfamiliar scaffolding. |
| AI SL Paper 1 | 90 minutes, calculator allowed | 80 marks | 40% | Short-response questions. |
| AI SL Paper 2 | 90 minutes, calculator allowed | 80 marks | 40% | Extended-response questions. |
| Internal Assessment (both courses) | Across the two-year Diploma | Marked on 5 criteria | 20% | Mathematical exploration, student-chosen topic. |
The method
A documented weekly system — the same one, wherever your child studies.
Every week opens with last week's wrong answers, because wrong answers are the cheapest source of marks. We work on what is live from school, advance the syllabus in order, and hold the same rhythm through mock weeks, IA deadlines and report cycles. Every session is recorded, summarised, and archived into a searchable library your child keeps for the entire Diploma — so the evening before a mock, they are searching a library of their own confusions, not scrolling a stranger's video for the same topic.
Documented, public on Google
The same evidence standard, wherever the student is based.
The method does not depend on geography — it depends on rhythm. Fourteen time zones away or one street over, the weekly system runs the same: diagnose, rebuild, drill against real exam questions, record everything.
The clearest documented case is a student who moved from a Grade 3 to two Grade 7 papers across a full two-year Diploma, in IB Math AI SL — delivered entirely online. It is a public Google review on the Business Profile, one of 19 reviews averaging 4.9 stars. Open the profile and read them yourself; none of it depends on taking my word for it.
Real admission requirements
Where the IB score actually leads.
The IB score isn't the only thing universities look at — but for competitive Mathematics, Physics and Engineering courses, it's the threshold that gets an application read. The AA/AI choice matters more at some of these than families are usually told.
| University | Requirement | Note |
|---|---|---|
| University of Oxford | Typically 39-40 points, HL pattern around 7-6-6 | AA HL is strongly preferred over AI for Mathematics and Engineering — AI is a real disadvantage here, not a neutral alternative. |
| University of Cambridge | 41-42 points, 7-7-6 at Higher Level | Engineering requires AA HL specifically — AI HL is not accepted — plus 7 in Physics or Chemistry HL. |
| Imperial College London | Minimum 40 points with 6 in Math HL and 6 in Physics HL; competitive offers run 7 and 7 | AA is preferred over AI, though both are formally accepted. |
Related pages
Ready to see if this is the right fit for your child?
Two free conversations come before anyone commits to anything. If I don't think the system will move your child meaningfully, I will tell you directly — I'd rather lose a client than take on a case I can't help.