HOW I GOT A 7 IN IB MATHS II PDF Notes + Study Strategies

hi everyone so i'm back again today for another ib video and in my video on how to get uh 45 in the ib then i actually got a request to cover ib maths so that's what we're doing today i was also really excited to make this video because maths is something that did not and does not come naturally to me um it was definitely the subject that i struggled most with during my ib and i definitely didn't start the ib at a seven standard but over the course of the two years then i developed new strategies to study maths which really helped me improve and ended up landing me with a seven and at the top of my class so if you're struggling with maths right now then don't worry i feel you and hopefully some of the strategies that i used they can help you as well so i'm just going to start off with some quick fire advice and then the majority of the video will be about how to study efficiently using some examples from my actual notes from the ib so first off in terms of resources i didn't really use anything special i just used the textbook and in class we had two textbooks so the oxford textbook and the heist textbook and the way that i use these is that in class the teacher would decide which textbook kind of covered a topic better and then that would be our sort of homework exercise and then when i was studying i would always start with oxford because i found that the questions in it were a bit easier and then i would move on to heat so i would kind of build up my confidence and my understanding and then move on to the more challenging more exam style questions and then when it came to past papers as i did for all of my iv subjects then i saved them right until the end for my final exam preparation because i wanted to use them when i had the maximum amount of knowledge that i would be really testing if i actually knew things for the final exam rather than using them earlier seeing a question and think oh well you know like maybe i'll learn that over time or oh actually we haven't covered that yet in class so yeah i saved all of the past papers until the end and i completed all of the past papers i don't know for the from the past 10 years or something like that um so basically i completed all of the past papers but only during my final exam preparation my next quick tip with regard to paper one is that when you're doing your homework and practice papers don't cheat when it says that it's a non-calculated question just because you need to be building up those non-calculated skills over time and i know for me i was always super slow i didn't learn my times tables up until like year 11 so like at the start of my iv and i just kind of learnt them through doing questions again and again and again and so the only way you're going to build up that comfort with not having the calculator and being able to manipulate those numbers is by actually doing it so just make sure that you're not cheating like typing things into your calculator when you do have those non-calc questions because i know it's very tempting so if that's paper one then my other quick tip for paper two is to become really good friends with your calculator when it comes to the actual calculator questions because in paper two then they have a whole bunch of easy marks that you can pick up just by knowing how to use your calculator so that's things like finding the intersection between two lines actually just drawing a graph finding the root um of an equation so lots of really easy stuff that you can kind of pick up those marks easily if you know how to use your calculator but are going to be more challenging and will take you more time in the exam if you're not really that comfortable with your calculator so get used to using your calculator early so that you can take advantage of all of its amazing features the next thing i found really helpful was to actually bring a highlighter into my exam which you might expect from an english exam but maybe not a maths exam but i found that this really increased my comprehension of the questions because it forced me to slow down and really process what the key points of information were in the question and it also helped me as i was doing my working to be able to quickly look back up at the question and see that key information that i needed to incorporate into my working so i would definitely recommend that but also just remember that although it's really great to highlight the question be careful to never highlight your actual working because when it's scanned into the computer to be sent to the ib markers then if you've highlighted something then they won't be able to read it so highlighters great for highlighting questions don't use them to highlight your working and then my final note is a question that i get from my students quite often which is should i write notes for maths so i think this kind of comes down to personal preference but for me i would say yes i would say just starting with basic notes of formulas and how to do questions is really helpful just because it gives you an easy reference to come back to if you do get stuck with a question but also as i'll discuss next then you can start to personalize them so they become a really um helpful study tool so that's it for the rapid fire tips now i'll just get onto the bulk of the video which is how to study effectively aka how to not keep making the same mistakes over and over again when i was studying maths the main advice that i got was to do lots of practice questions practice questions practice questions over and over again and i did heaps of practice questions but i found that i would keep coming back and making the same mistakes over and over again um and that obviously wasn't very helpful that i was practicing but it didn't seem like i was actually improving um and so i like to think about kind of there being two categories when you're doing practice questions so when you're doing your homework then to me that's just like the repetition the rote learning you know doing things multiple times to kind of get that method into your brain um and to get it to stick and so that's fine in terms of like doing a large volume of questions and just you know like completing all of the homework exercises i think that's good um but then i think the other category is when you're actually studying and you're doing these questions in order to identify holes in your learning or to confirm your understanding and i think that's where the really efficient and valuable studying comes in and that's why my main strategy when it came to studying maths centered around what i actually did when i got a question wrong so what i would try to do is i would try to identify the root cause of why i got that question wrong not just the mistake that i made but what was the flaw in my thinking or my approach to that question which caused me to make that mistake once i identified this root cause then i would integrate it into my actual notes and so in this way my notes evolved from just an an objective written out list of formulas and methods for doing questions and instead changed into this kind of personalized file of all of the mistakes that i had made and the kind of strategies that i needed to put in place in order to prevent making those mistakes again so basically the main goal here is that rather than turning through hundreds of questions mindlessly it's to do fewer questions but really mindfully and reflect on what you need to change in order to not make the same mistake in the future and then by integrating those into your notes then your notes now become a road map on how to tackle the questions that you personally find the most difficult so now i'm going to break down the three main ways that i used to get maths questions wrong and my strategy to address each of them so my first type of mistake was when i didn't even know which theory to use so this is like when you look at a question and you're like i don't even know how to approach this um so maybe you know you're doing probability and you don't even know if it's a binomial or normal distribution or maybe it's a sequences and series questions and you don't even know if it's an arithmetic or geometric sequence and so you don't even know how to apply the formulas so if i identified that this was the issue in the question then i would ask myself what was the cue in the question that i missed which was telling me that i needed to use this particular strategy these cues might be in the wording of the question or they also might be in terms of what information the question gives like if the question only gives you know two particular pieces of information sometimes there's only one formula which those two pieces of information would fit into so you know that that's the one that you have to use and what i found helpful to keep in mind is that there's a limited number of different types of questions that the ib can ask that fall within the syllabus and they tend to ask these types of questions all in the same way or in a similar format and so once you can kind of hack into that format that they're using then the ib is kind of already telling you what strategy you have to use to answer the question an example of this might be when there are probability questions and they use the phrase at least so um for example the probability that at least one of the cards drawn out of a pack is an ace then you're always going to use the formula structure of one minus the probability of that event so one minus the probability that the card drawn is an ace so kind of when i would be going through those questions with my little highlighter then i would highlight at least and know that that was like my cue or my trigger word um to use that particular formula sometimes it's not so easy to identify these cues and this is why i think this is a really good time to ask your teachers and ask your friends if they got the question kind of ask them how did you know that that was the strategy that you were supposed to use for that question because often when we see the answer or the worked solutions then it can be really obvious we're like oh well that's how you would do that question but it's hard when you're going from the question and then just having to think of that strategy on your own so i found it useful to actually have to get into the mindset of people who could think of that strategy and say okay what kind of like a detective what were the clues that you saw in the question that led you to that conclusion so overall if i didn't know what theory to even start with on a question then i would ask someone else how did you know that that was what you needed to do for that question and then i would write down what the cue was and what type of question that aligned with so that was my strategy for when i didn't know even what theory to even start with to try and approach a question but then the next type of error that i would make would be when i would correctly identify the theory or the formula which i needed to use but then i would apply it incorrectly so i don't know why but the binomial expansion was just the bane of my existence when i was in maths and whenever i saw a question i would always be able to tell um this is a binomial expansion question and i would just be filled with dread and like anticipation to start the questions because i'd be like oh no i'm probably going to get this question wrong and so i was obviously able to tell what type of approach i was supposed to take but i just didn't really know how to do it or i kept making mistakes in how i was applying it so when you have a circumstance like that i would recommend writing out a generic series of steps which takes you through step by step how to approach that particular kind of question so using the binomial expansion example then for every single type of binomial expansion question that i came across then i wrote out step by step how i should approach that question so this is kind of integrated with the previous tip where i would identify that something requires a binomial expansion and then i would identify a cue in the question which would tell me the particular type of binomial expansion question that it was were they asking me to find the constant term the general term so i had all of these cues and then for each of them i would write out a series of steps on how to approach the question so that in the exam when i saw that cue and i saw that it was a binomial expansion then i could just click into those series of steps um and it would be very sort of straightforward and i would say okay i know with certainty that this is how to approach this question because here's the cue and then here the here are the steps that i've written down to approach it and here's just another example from vectors where there's this very standard question of find the shortest distance from a given point to a given line um and again i would have trouble with this so then i wrote out a series of steps that i could just follow rather than having to think through and like reinvent the wheel every time i tried to do this question i just had a series of steps that i followed and i knew worked and then the final type of mistake i would make would be the silly mistake and the thing is that sometimes these mistakes were just silly i would often reflect on the state that i was actually doing the questions in so was it late at night or something like that where i was really tired and i was only making this mistake because i wasn't thinking clearly at the time but i found that often the silly mistakes that i was making weren't just random they were actually bad habits that i had gotten myself into unconsciously or maybe i had just never picked up the good habit for example with integration then i would always forget to add the plus c at the end of my equation after i had integrated it and you know that was something which when i looked at the answer then i'd be like oh that was just a silly mistake of course i know that i need to add plus c so logically in my mind i knew that that was something that i needed to do but it was a silly mistake that i kept making over and over again in my questions and so then for these kinds of mistakes then i found that there were two strategies which were effective to resolve them firstly is that when you find these silly mistakes that you're making actually write them down so that you can start to identify that passion of oh yeah i do often forget to add the plus c at the end of my equation or oh yeah i do actually forget to you know do the same thing to both sides of my equation so just bringing that awareness to the silly mistake can be good because it means that when you see that kind of question then it creates this kind of cue in your mind to remember oh this is a mistake that i often make when doing these kinds of questions like for me if i see an integration question i think i often forget to add plus c okay that's at the forefront of my mind now that once i get up to that step that's something that i need to do the second way to approach it is to actually think about and build into your method a strategy which makes sure that you're not doing the silly mistake so for example when i was looking through my notes i found under this section about solving logarithmic equations i had the basic steps of how to solve a logarithmic equation but i had also written this note to myself to say you know when you find your solution then make sure that you sub it back in and make sure that the thing inside the brackets of the log is not a negative number because you can't have a negative number in there and so obviously i had made this like silly mistake several times when i was solving these logarithmic equations and so i was like okay how am i going to solve this i'm going to create an extra step always i'm going to check after i've solved a logarithmic equation whether that whether it passes this test of having a positive value within the brackets so those are kind of the two ways just bringing awareness to it so that it's like cued in your mind when you are doing those types of questions to not make that particular mistake which is individual to you and then secondly involving strategies of checking or just as you're going through having a particular strategy in mind which addresses the particular mistake which you tend to make so that's all in terms of the types of mistakes and how you can address them i would also just say that something which i found helpful was to also write down the questions which i was getting wrong as i was studying because i find that this creates a really nice closed circle of revision of getting a question wrong identifying the root cause of why you got that question wrong initiating a strategy in order to address that root cause and reflect on how you can have it not happen in the future and then return to that same question and see if your strategies have been effective in addressing that underlying root misunderstanding or root issue and how you're performing the question so i found that to be a nice sort of circle of making a mistake trying to change it and then having confirmation of whether my strategies had been effective and the final piece of advice that i want to leave you with is just to not be too hard on yourself when it comes to your maths marks you're in this for the long haul the ib is a two-year process and improving your maths won't happen overnight whenever i was going into a test then my goal was always just to improve my score from the last test it wasn't to get a seven or to pass that grade boundary and personally that really helped my mindset because it meant that i wasn't kicking myself for not getting a seven on every test because that didn't happen for a really long time um instead i could just be happy with the small improvements i was making each time and then eventually that got me to my final goal so yeah be kind to yourself and you'll get there eventually so that's all for today let me know if you find any of those tips useful and also whether there are any other particular ib videos which you'd be interested in seeing i'm heading into exams but i'll do my best to get them to you and i guess i'll see you next video bye

Channel: Ashley's Academy

Views: 36,048

Keywords: how to get a 7 in ib math sl, how to get a 7 in ib math, how to get a 7 in ib math hl, ib math ia, ib math hl, ib math sl, ib maths, ib maths tips, ib maths advice, ib math tips, ib math advice, how to get a 45 in ib, how to get a 45 in the ib, math study tips, how to study math, how to study maths effectively, how to make maths notes, how to write math notes, ib math aa, ib math ai, ib math aa 7, ib math ai 7, ib maths aa, ib maths ai, ib maths ai tips

Id: APkysczS31E

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021