FAQs: Examinations
Your questions about examinations, answered here! Add your own questions as comments below, and we'll add them to the page.
Essentially, there are two aspects to this:
- Your students need to learn the concepts, definitions, problem-solving skills, and so forth.
- Your students need to practice solving problems.
The simplest answer, for most students, is to do lots of practice problems.
On our website, once you've set up Student access, you can allow students to access all the practice, MCQs, and problems on the website by selecting “Switch all on” in the Page manager tab of the Student access manager. You can also create new tasks using the qBank in Student access manager. Finally, don't forget to share the Mock exams with students if they haven't seen them yet.
You can also share past papers with students. Schools can buy past papers from the IBO, or you can access them via the IBO QuestionBank.
It would be unwise, however, for students only to do practice problems. They should develop an understanding of the examination, learn test-taking skills, and prepare to optimize their test-taking. Our Exam preparation guide will be useful for students to help with this.
We'd suggest that students should always have a data booklet and an acceptable calculator when they solve problems. Where possible, have students write quizzes and tests on stationary similar to the final exam, so they develop proficiency with writing suitably concise answers within the answer box.
As they get closer to the final exam, it may also be worthwhile developing a good sense for timing, which is around 2 minutes per point.
The rule for significant figures is to round your final answer to the same number of sig figs as the least precise value used in the calculation. Some people get really caught up on this, but it's important to remember that this is just a rule of thumb to help students know how many digits to write down from their calculator. When we work with real experimental data, we use uncertainties to determine the precision of results.
On the exam, students should write a few sig figs for all their answers (say, 3 to 5), with two exceptions:
- If the question asks specifically for the correct number of significant figures — usually on Paper 1B — then they need to apply the rule mentioned above.
- If the question asks students to “show that”, then the last step is giving the answer to at least 1 more sig fig than the given answer, and then showing that their more precise answer rounds to the given answer.
We've written more about significant figures in Exam preparation: Paper 1B.