People. Of course I have failed in the IB before I got a 45. I have tanked so many exams, getting up to as low as a two, three and four, even still on my second year of IB. And that's why I think today we need to talk about failure in IB. Aloha, it's Katie. Guess who's back talking about the IB after having IB PTSD. A lot of you guys may know me as an IB graduate in May 2018, which was actually two years ago. That's not that far actually. I am a third year college student now at Cornell University studying Information Science. But before I moved to New York, I actually studied in the Philippines, and that's where I completed the IB diploma and got a perfect score of 45. Ever since that video, a lot of people have been requesting that I do more IB videos. And so I did. I talked about my tips for how I got a 45, how to get straight sevens. I even started an IB student community with my friend Imogen, and we even do free tutoring and mentoring now with our amazing team of grads around the world. And one thing I never talked about, that is so normal in the IB, is failure. And I know right now is the season of exams. Some people are having mock exams. Some first year students are facing the reality of how hard IB can be. And I just want to dedicate this video to every time I have failed in the IB, in hopes that it'll encourage you that this is so normal, it's so part of the journey. Like, you are not an IB student unless you've been near on the verge of tears. They ask you how you are, you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine. It is something IB students bond over so strongly about. The IB program is not easy. The workload is a lot. So let this video be a fun reminder to you guys that even people who score a 45 or seem to do very well have had their fair share of failures. And if you too are striving for a top score, even just trying to pass the IB diploma, then know that failure is part of the journey. The number one question I've been getting from first years who literally just started the IB program like two or three months ago is, "Katie. I have been getting threes and fours on my exams. Can I still get a seven?" And the answer is, of course you can. I failed exams in my first few months of the IB. And guys, you don't realize the IB is a two year program where you are going to grow so much in that span of 500, 600 days. Of course, you are not going to know much when you start the IB. Like the first time I failed, I was really shook though, so it was my economics HL class, and we were learning microeconomics, which is taxes and subsidies, and our teacher told us to write practice essays before our exam, and if we wanted, we could share it with him so he could look over and give us feedback. I chose the prompt about overfishing, and I don't even remember, like, oh, my gosh, I probably said a really dumb solution about how you should subsidize. Basically, my subsidy was not the answer to overfishing, but I said it, and I kid you not, I will never forget the way my heart sunk with fear when my teacher commented on my document, and he said more practice is needed to avoid failure on the IB exam. And so I got scarred, obviously, because I thought I was doing okay in microeconomics, but clearly my professor didn't think otherwise. And by the way, that exam was going to be the next day. And I was panicking, like, I don't know what I'm going to do. But funny enough, that exact question was one of two prompts that came out in the exam. And I was like, Guys, just imagine me after the teacher tells me I'm basically going to fail the IB exam. And then the next day, I get that exact prompt. So I'm kind of like I'm just sitting there in my seat, and I'm like, alright, well, what can I do? Right? I did do a bit of research after that on overfishing, and then I was like, okay, we need laws and regulations. We need partnerships. Basically, the question required solutions outside of the tax and subsidies that I've learned. But you guys, you will be surprised at how this story ends. After two days, when I have the class again, I show up to class. I know we're getting our papers back, and I'm just like, I just prepared myself for the failure already. But it happened to be that everybody had failed the exam, and I was actually the only one who had passed. And not only passed, but I got a seven on that paper, and I was just so shook. Like, I was so embarrassed in a new way because my teacher had read my essay to all the three classes of students were taking Economics HL, and I was like, oh, my gosh, why is he reading out my essay right now? I thought I was really trash, but it worked out. And it was such a big moment for me because it made me realize that IB is really all about practice, and it's about working with your teachers and researching a lot until you get to where you need to. In retrospect, I should not have beaten myself up over failing that practice exam, because I didn't know anything. I shouldn't have expected myself to know anything about how to deal with overfishing, especially as someone who had a zero economics background going into that class. The second thing I realized is, like, that's when my peers, I think, started thinking that I was really smart. The truth is, like, I just worked hard. All I did was I put in the effort to look at the past paper prompts and review them in my head, plan out what my responses would be, and if I didn't know how to do, then I would research it so I would be able to go in the exam with at least some solution to the paper. The only difference that I did was, like, an hour of research the night before, and that was all it took for me to go from like, a two, three to a seven. And yet, in that moment, I could feel that my friends thought they were so far away from me and that there was no hope of ever passing. And I was like, that is not true. What matters is what you do with the feeling of failure, because I felt it too. Guys, remember that right now, the situation you guys are in your classroom is– this is all still practice, okay? It might seem like you're going to fail the IB or you're not doing well in the test, but remember, this is not the exam you are going to be sitting two years from now. Well, if like, COVID, you know, works out. Remember that when you take that exam two years from now, you are going to have so much more knowledge than you did in this moment. So best advice for first year students is remember that your grades right now, whatever you get on your exam, is only a reflection of the moment, only the present moment. Give yourself some slack. Take it easy on yourself, guys, and just continue to have an open mindset and just put in the work every day to learn. IB is really a marathon. It is not a sprint. I have had my fair share of cramming. All IB students do. But just do a little bit every day and you will be surprised by how much you know at the end of the two years. The second time I failed was my Chinese reading comprehension. It was so bad, I thought I could read Chinese characters. But when I saw that article in front of me and I realized I could not even read the question, that's how I knew I was screwed. Like big time screwed. You can imagine the rest of the exam, I was just stressed. I was getting anxious by the minute. And every time I tried to read a word and then I realized I didn't know what it meant, I would feel a little more hopeless. And then I would look at the article, I would not be able to read the article. And then I felt even more hopeless. And by the end of it, I had left like, half the questions unanswered because I didn't know. I could only come up with so much given I could not read anything. So I was basically accepting defeat as I left the room. And a few days after, when we came back to class, mostly everybody had tanked it. The best score was a four. I was actually surprised that people had gotten fours and threes, because, again, I thought I was okay at Chinese, and I was actually, like, one of two people who had scored the lowest. I scored a two on that. You can also imagine my fear in that moment that I was like, oh, my gosh, if this is going to be on the IB exam, then I might not pass, because this reading score, no matter how good my other writing pieces are, oral pieces are, my reading comprehension is going to bring me down. So my teacher also talked to me after class, and she was like, I noticed you didn't do very well. And I was like, I knew that. And I just asked, is there any way I can pass? What do I do? I didn't want to ask it, but that was exactly the thought in my head, is like, what do I do? Thankfully, the teacher was very encouraging. She was like, These are the strategies. First, like, strengthen your vocab, strengthen your sentence structure. You don't need to know all the words in any reading comprehension. Just like in English, when you read something, you don't know every word, but you have context clues and you can infer. So I did a lot of practice for my Chinese reading comprehension. I practiced just, like, understanding first the main idea, even if I didn't understand everything. And then I looked at sentence structures. And then when we had our second reading comprehension, I was still nervous as heck. But then I had gotten a six. And for me, that was like, I never felt more relieved in my life because I was like, okay, a six. I can work with this. I'll just work harder for my written tasks paper. And it's okay if my reading comprehension is a six because it can still average out to a seven in the end. This time, I had gotten one of the top scores because I had just put in the work between my failure and the eventual success. And this is another key thing that has kept me going so much in that IB is like, it's not about the failure in the moment. It's how you pick yourself up from it, and it's how you look at failure, too. I stopped looking at it as failure if I got a three or a four, I just looked at it as there are clearly topics I haven't studied yet that I am not familiar with. And all I need to do is just fill in the gaps in the knowledge, and whenever the next test comes, I will be prepared for it. That is honestly a life skill that I have taken on to me in college. Anyways, after we learned about the grades, I was kind of mortified because my teacher had been going on a rant again about how people were just being lazy. And then she cited me as an example in Chinese. She was like, look at Katie, she got a two on the first exam, and now she got a six. And I was like, she really just exposed me right there of getting a two. I remember everybody looking at me and they were like, you got a two? They were like, Did I hear that right? I thought it was funny that my peers looked at me and they thought that I would be like, crushing it all the time, all the time. But of course not. People are struggling silently so much. Nobody likes talking about failures. I in general did not talk about my grades. I don't know if your school is like this, but mine is like, what did you get on the test, after we our scores back. I was always like, pretty quiet. My number one excuse was just like, oh, I did better than expected. And I'm like, it's okay if you tank it. That's always why I say I just do better than expected. And if somebody asks you that, you can also say that. I think it's a good cop-out. Third time I failed was my second year. So you would think that by second year I would have it all figured out, but no, that kind of blew up in my face for my Computer Science HL Java paper. So this is option D. I was doing object oriented programming, and I was super rusty with Java because for the previous months we had been studying like, operating systems and just memorizing a lot of CS concepts. And I went into the exam, I realized how much I forgot. I think around that time I was also doing my TOK presentation, finishing my EE that I had crammed in the summer of senior year. It did not work out well. Okay? I got a three and legit mocks were coming up and we were supposed to have known most of the material by then, by the way, and I'm still getting a three. In either case, I got it together. I sat myself down and I was also like, okay, Katie, if you are going to major in computer science in college or pursue a degree in computer science, then you really need to know this stuff. So I sat myself down. I think I did a bunch of coding bat or some of the online programming practice websites. I also looked through the past papers and reviewed all the concepts. And by the next time mocks had rolled around, I had gotten it up to like a six, seven. But that's also another thing I talked about in the video is you see a seven as your final grade in the IB exam, but you don't realize that you don't need all sevens to get a seven. You literally just have to, like– Each assessment for a subject weighs a certain amount. It's like paper one, maybe 20%, paper 2, 30%, paper three, blah blah, and then IA, whatever. So as long as within those four assessments you average a score that is like 6.5 or 6.6, theoretically you're a seven. So that's another thing is like, I got a seven. It's not because I got 100 out of 100 points, it's because I got like 90, 92. I think I even got as low as like 84 on one of them, but it was still a seven. So get it out of your minds that a seven is like a perfect. It's not. A seven in IB is very generous, honestly. It is a range. It is like 85 and above for some subjects. The fourth time I failed was also senior year. It wasn't actually a fail, it was a four. It was for my chemistry IA. Our first draft, the IA, I had gotten a four and that had brought my grade down. And fun fact, that is the class that had changed my GPA from a 7.0 to a 6.9. And I'm not going to be annoying about the grades because objectively, like a six is high. But I thought it'd just be fun to mention that because in my Revealing My Stats video, I talked about how when I applied early action to US colleges, I had a 7.0 GPA. But then after I applied, my GPA dropped to a 6.9. And it's because of chemistry. That worked out in the end because I got a seven in chemistry. Lol I just like sometimes I look back at my decision reaction and I look at how little I cared when I opened my chemistry grade and was so surprised that I'd actually passed. In terms of my strategy for chem IAs, I definitely looked at other exemplars. I looked at how to structure my IA, how to structure a research paper, and also set up the experiment. Oh my gosh, I hate significant figures. Now that I've shared those failure stories though, I think the most important thing I need to tell you is how you can apply them to your own studies right now. So if there's anything you take away from this video, aside from a good laugh that this 45 student has failed a lot before she got there, it's these five things. So first is a growth mindset. Know that what you score now is not stagnant. It is not going to stay that way because you have the power to grow from it and bring it up to a six or a seven in the next two years. It's a lot of time, guys. It is easy to feel the weight of everything you're expected to do in the IB. You know, you have IAs coming up, you have exams, you have TOKs, you have so much piling up on your plate. But remember that you have two years. You have friends, you have teachers, you have winter breaks, you have the support of me and the IBlieve community, and we are all here to support you. Because the IB is something you have to take day by day. Focus on the things that you can do today, and over time, you will realize that all those small steps you took over the course of the years accumulate to this upward sloping trend where you will grow so much. The second thing is, don't forget why you started IB. Yes, a lot of people do IB because it is internationally recognized, it's promising on college applications, and it's a great program. But don't forget that at the heart of it is really a love for learning, a love to become smarter, to learn more about the world. And every day, if you focus on that, you just find that your curiosity drives you in the learning. It makes you want to pay attention in the class. It makes you want to better yourself. And I think that's one of the best things about IB is there are so many opportunities to grow. IB definitely helped me with critical thinking. It made me challenge a lot of things. The parents aren't very happy because I'm always talking back now and TOKing their arguments and questioning them. But it really did help me process the world and help me find my opinion. It helped me find my identity and stop following people. And it helped me improve my speaking. It helped me improve my reading and writing. And you guys can learn more about that in my "was the IB worth it?" video and also sneak peek. Next week's video is going to be why I did the IB diploma program, what the benefits really are from a college student's perspective, and also whether you should, especially if you are a prospective IB student watching right now. Third is to remember that IB is graded holistically. Just because one part of your grade, like your paper one or your IA isn't looking so hot, it doesn't mean that you can't do well, because you still have all the other ways of testing to prove your knowledge in that subject. And that's why I really like the IB too is it gave us lots of ways to demonstrate our understanding. Another way I like to put that is this quote, "lose the battle, win the war." If you want to look at IB as a war, you have many different fronts. You have many different subjects that you are trying to advance in in this war. And some battles you may need to sacrifice. Like if you have to balance your TOK essay and your EE and this chemistry test, then sometimes maybe you will have to study less on the chemistry test so you can focus on the other things. But after that, the battle is still raging on. You still have another opportunity to push your chemistry grade along. And so, just remember that you can lose small battles and still overall win the war. You can overall still score a seven, pass the IB diploma. Actively apply the IB skills that you learn. When Valentine's Day rolled around and I was the president of the Visual Arts Club, we were doing a handmade card sale and so I was whipping out all of these cute chemistry pickup lines and giving people a good laugh and also fundraising for the service partner we had. Another example is in my math IA, I chose to do my topic on YouTube videos. Actually, my research question was like, how often should I upload a video to optimize the number of views I get? And that IA did really well. I used calculus to find the rate at which my videos would get a lot of views, would decline in views, and then sync those up so that every time one of my old videos started dying down, I would upload a new video to continue that momentum on my channel. So that was super helpful. The answer, spoiler, was that the optimal time was 6.7 days, which is basically seven days, which was basically a week. And that was what I had been doing, but I had proven it mathematically, so that was very cool. There are actually many opportunities in IB to do the things you care about and get credit for it. CAS is such a good example of that because you are literally forced to do your hobby. I think a lot of people in IB are like, oh my gosh, I'm ready to sacrifice my social life now, I'm not going to have any hobbies. That's not true at all. A lot of my hobbies, I had just repurposed them and actually CAS gave me a reason to continue the hobbies and make sure that I stayed in touch with my social life. And the fifth and most important thing is find a community of IB students to support you, to keep you going. This, and it's one reason we started IBlieve, it is a community of amazing like, oh my gosh, I just love when I think of the friends I've made who are in high school, who are recent grads. They are so amazing. You guys have to join basically. After this video, you have to go to the link in the description and join IBlieve, especially if you are looking for a positive and a supportive community that knows how to have fun but also knows how to get the work done, then definitely join it. It's like the community I wish I had when I was going through IB. Everyone is so supportive. Like, whenever people have a question, they just ask, and so many people offer resources. It's so cool because we're also all over the world, so people will share different techniques from their different schools around the world. And you get this newfound perspective in the IB, and you also realize how the IB is actually such a powerful way to unite people. It is a shared struggle, but it is also a shared victory. IBlieve is a free community. You just have to fill up a form to get access because we want to make sure that everyone who is joining is there to also contribute to uplift other people. And we believe everyone wants to see each other succeed. Aside from that, we also offer free mentoring and tutoring from our amazing graduates. If you're a grad, by the way, and you want to volunteer, then please also join. What we look for the most is someone who cares about giving back to the community. And we also have a YouTube channel. You also have to follow us on Instagram at IBlieve. We post three or four new articles every week with beautiful graphics. We debunk IB myths like, oh, is it true that I have to pull all-nighters in IB or give it my social life? And we also do a lot of subject tips and create so many resources. Guys, there's just so much knowledge. We have tried to compile and bring back to the IB community so that you guys can succeed during this time. So just I highly recommend you check the description box, spend your day exploring all our resources, and I just really, really hope that they help you, that they encourage you. I hope this video was fun and reminded you that it's so normal to be failing in IB. And you know what? I failed beyond IB. I'm in college, and I have failed. Like, C's get degrees is lowkey true. If you guys have any other videos you want to see about the IB, please just comment them down below. Make sure to give this video a thumbs up if want to see more IB videos. I haven't done them in a while. I don't know if you guys still want IB videos. I actually just did this video because I was so immersed in the IBlieve community, and I realized there were things I still didn't talk about on my channel, and so that's why I came back to do this video. And that's why next week, I'm going to do a video on why I did the IB and what the benefits actually are. So make sure you subscribe down below to get notified for that video and comment if there's any other video I can do that I haven't already done, that you would find helpful. Check out my beginner's guide to IB and how I got a 45 series by clicking the top right "i". And follow me on Instagram at @alohakatiex for updates for, I don't know, anything. DM me. And yeah, I believe you can do it. God believes you can do it, and you should believe you can do it, too. Take care, guys.
