The May 2019 IB examination session is now finished.  Teachers are eager to scrutinize an exam after it has been made available 24 hours after students have taken it. This usually leads to some interesting discussion amongst teachers about specific exam questions and their solutions. Some years I manage to summon enough time and energy to write my own set of complete worked solutions for one or more of the HL or SL exams. Although having discussions with other teachers about the exam questions is often instructive and worthwhile, if I do compose a set of worked solutions, I do it for primarily two reasons: (1) To satisfy my own curiosity. In my opinion, the only way to get a genuine ‘feel’ for an exam is to carefully work through all the questions yourself. (2) To assemble a high-quality assignment for my 1^st year students. I am usually teaching integral calculus to my 1^st year Maths HL or SL students about this time of the school year; and the only syllabus topic that has not yet been covered to any extent is Probability & Statistics. Usually, the Paper 1 exam will contain fewer questions on probability and/or statistics. Thus, most (if not all) of the questions on the Paper 1 exam can be attempted by my 1^st year students.  After removing any questions or parts of questions on the Paper 1 exam that are on syllabus items that have not been covered yet, I distribute the set of Paper 1 questions to my 1^st year students and give them a few days to work on them. I then give them my worked solutions and we discuss. It’s a nice review assignment for students not long before the summer holiday break between the 1^st and 2^nd years. Also, it’s the first time that I share a complete IB maths exams with my 1^st year students, so this assignment provides some useful insights into what an IB maths exam is really like.

You can view – and download – my worked solutions for the HL Paper 1 exam (2019 TZ2) here. Any feedback is appreciated.