IB Maths and Physics Exam Revision: Diagnose, Practise, Retest
By Renzo Diaz·4 min read
A revision calendar tells you when to work — it doesn't tell you what to repair. There's no universal week count or fixed percentage of marks lost to specific subtopics that applies to every student; those figures aren't established for anyone in particular. A three-phase loop — establish a real baseline, repair one cause at a time, then retest on an unfamiliar problem — builds a plan from a student's own actual working instead.
Generic revision advice tends to arrive as a fixed template — twelve weeks, a set number of past papers, a claimed percentage of marks lost to a specific topic — regardless of what a particular student's own work actually shows. That template can be comfortable precisely because it doesn't require looking at real evidence first. A plan built the other way around, starting from a student's own marked working, takes more effort to set up but targets what's actually costing marks rather than a guess about what usually does.
A calendar tells you when to work. It doesn't tell you what to repair — only a student's own working does that.
1. Phase 1 — establish a real baseline
Choose a paper that actually matches the student's subject, level, syllabus and assessment format — a mismatched paper produces a diagnosis of the wrong exam. Sit it under timed conditions when that's realistic, then mark both the final answers and the visible reasoning, not just the final answers alone. On a review sheet, record each lost mark under one of four headings: missing concept, inappropriate method, execution error, or insufficient evidence — including the specific question and the precise line where the route first went wrong.
The IB publishes its own sample exam papers directly, and a school can help identify which official material actually matches a specific course. Checking the syllabus year matters here specifically: the Physics course first assessed in 2025 differs from older papers, and Mathematics AA and AI both change for first assessment in 2029 — a paper pulled from the wrong syllabus generation produces a misleading baseline.
2. Phase 2 — repair one cause at a time
Once the baseline identifies where marks are actually being lost, the temptation is to assign more exercises across every chapter that came up. That scatters attention rather than fixing anything — the better approach is picking the error with the greatest repeated effect and correcting the underlying decision behind it. If a student loses marks across several topics because they consistently don't define variables, for instance, the fix is that one habit, not five separate topic reviews.
In Physics, the useful distinction is between a wrong physical model and a simple arithmetic slip — they need completely different fixes. In Mathematics, it's the distinction between a calculator-produced result and an actually supported argument. Short, targeted practice sets while rebuilding the specific prerequisite, followed by a return to full mixed papers, tends to work better than broad, unfocused repetition — learning a technique in an isolated, labelled chapter is only the first stage, not the finish line.
3. Phase 3 — retest on a genuinely different problem
Give the student an unfamiliar question that combines the just-corrected idea with a different topic, and ask for an explanation with no model solution present. If they can only repeat a memorised sequence of steps, the repair hasn't actually transferred yet — go back to the choice-of-method stage. If they can explain when the method applies, and just as importantly when it doesn't, the repair is genuinely more likely to hold under exam conditions.
Repeating a full timed paper after enough targeted work makes for a meaningful comparison — measuring the change in marks, in the types of error made, and in how independent the student's reasoning actually was. Grade boundaries vary between assessment sessions, so a percentage on one past paper should never be treated as a guaranteed prediction of a future IB grade.
If a student can only repeat a memorised sequence of steps, the repair hasn't transferred yet.
4. Fit the schedule to the actual exam and student, not a template
Whether the runway is six months or six days changes what the plan should look like, but the underlying loop doesn't change. With a longer runway, alternating topic repair with mixed questions and gradually increasing timed work tends to work well. Closer to the exam, prioritising high-impact recurring errors, pacing, and rest matters more than trying to cover new ground. Either way, the schedule needs to be built against the student's actual dates — an Internal Assessment, TOK, or the Extended Essay may have real school deadlines competing for the same time, and a generic "week 1 through week 12" template from an unrelated source won't know that.
A short weekly review captures the loop without turning it into extra administrative work: what failed independently this week, what was repaired, and what gets tested next. That keeps the plan accountable to real evidence, and lets it actually change when the evidence does.
Sources
Sources below are the IB's own current curriculum pages, checked directly in a browser.