IB HISTORY HL: HOW TO GET A 7

hello everyone its Elina and today I'll be sharing with you guys my tips for getting a 7 in history or nose of you guys who don't know what I just graduated from an Ivy School well just graduated it's maybe a little bit of an understatement like 4 months ago but I got a 7 in history and I thought I'd share with you guys what I did in order to get that great my first tip is to follow two Bibles now you're probably thinking like what this is not religious studies no I don't mean the Bible I mean the Bible's that a teacher wrote for students who are studying history HL or SL so what exactly are these ok so my teacher actually wrote these Bibles and I have both of them the link below so they're just called like the paper 1 Bible and the paper 2 and free Bible and basically what they do is they give you an instruction on how to write these papers and if you follow these Bibles you will definitely score high on your papers so like this teacher just broke everything down and basically what it does is it tells you how to structure your answers it tells you what you should include how you should write it how much you should write per question and it is just so useful so if you don't exactly know how to score high on these papers just check out the Bible's they are super useful and I would highly recommend really studying these Bibles and actually knowing by heart what to do in these papers they even tell you how much time you should spend on different questions so if you want to go into an exam being really prepared and knowing how to ace that exam the Bibles are your new best friends my second tip is to really make history a priority I think this is really really important and a lot of people actually forget about that so what I would recommend is write down all your subjects and then allocate how much hours you're gonna spend on these in a given week and this is really important and then also keep in mind which ones are you standard level subjects which ones are your higher level subjects which subjects are easier for you which ones are harder for you and even if history is a little bit easier for you you should still spend more time on it than you spend on any of your sl's because after all it is a higher level subject for you so you should spend more time on it and if you are done earlier with something then just use the given time that you still have in order to study for the subject especially for history it's really important that you make study notes and that's why you need a lot of time over the week in order to write down your notes because if you think you're gonna write all your notes during your study leave in your second year well that is not gonna happen because you cannot write down like 300 years of history in different countries in like two weeks and still learn it and prepare for your other five subjects that's just not gonna work so don't count on those two weeks of study leave if you even get two weeks so better prepare in order to not having to write any of your notes during study leave that is really a relief so do that and regarding how much time you should allocate to history in a week I can't give you like a given amount that you can study for and you're gonna have a seven because everybody's a little bit different and everybody has a different skill level in history so I can't exactly say how much you need to do but I think you need to do at least five hours a week and that's like a bare minimum if you're studying history HL but you're probably going to have to do more but that really also depends on your history teacher and how much homework they give because if they just give you like tons of homework you always have to allocate more hours to it because you also need to write your study notes and talking about study notes it is also really really important that you actually have a plan of which units of the course you have already written your notes for and which ones you still need to do them for because you don't want to be a person that sits there study leaving it's like okay so I have like a bunch of notes and I guess they cover the entire syllabus but I don't really know because that is not a good idea because you don't want to open up your example and be like I have never even heard of this topic because I did not study it that is just terrible so what you should do is you should print out your entire syllabus and then just you know use a highlighter and highlight every part of the syllabus where you already have notes on and if your entire syllabus is highlighted then you've done your job and all your study notes are done if you don't know which parts of the history syllabus your class is studying talk to your teacher they should be able to give you the entire outline of the syllabus points that you are studying and you really need to study all of them for history because the papers can be on literally any of these bullet points in the syllabus and you are not going to have endless options in these papers so make sure that you really know which points you have to study and if you study them all don't think you can outsmart the eye you'd be like oh that topic was on the paper like five times so it's not going to be there for a sixth time no don't take too risk it's your final exam you do not want to be in the exam be like damn I really got this wrong because that would not be great now my next tip is to have historiography for all your bullet points now you're probably thinking like wait I'm supposed to remember all these dates and historiography for all of it like no don't worry here's what you do you need to know which historians wrote on which topic and don't just take like a super random historian that no one ever heard of pick like you know the more famous ones on the issues so if you're for example studying Nazi Germany you probably want to name-drop Goldhagen somewhere in there because well he's a really famous historian on the topic but now you're probably thinking well I cannot remember quotations on all of that so first of all you don't need to quote the historians okay it's enough if you paraphrase and if you just have their opinion and what is really great is if you know where there are areas of debate and if you have historians from the different groups and you can explain so for example storing a things that this was the main cause of that civil war whereas historian being argues that this factor was actually more significant for you outbreak of the war now one thing when it comes to historiography that a lot of students do is they name drop schools of thought like revisionism and the Orthodox school of thought and whatever and they actually have no clue what it means now you can totally do that not the thing with not knowing what it means but you know saying well there is an Orthodox school thought regarding this event and here is what they argue so sometimes you actually don't need to know a particular historian it's enough if you know what school of thought things about that and so for example you can then compare Orthodox school of thought versus revisionist school of thought on a particular event if you know what they actually think of that event great but don't just name drop these things if you have no clue what they mean because your examiner is going to retail and it's going to be like what the hell did this student do this is just a mess and then your historiography doesn't get you bonus points it actually makes your examiner a lot more suspicious of your essay and they are more inclined to double-check everything you wrote okay my next tip is to do practice papers and to do a lot of them actually to do as many as you can now for history during practice papers can actually be quite hard because the papers are really long and you don't just want to know sit down for a few hours and bite a few essays it just takes way too much time out of your week and it is just not doable so how do you revise easily but still keep everything in mind and you know get better skills for essay writing I would highly recommend writing outlines just the outline for an essay and then take a look at it and think about is his argument solid do I have historiography in there is my introduction good but short do I have a solid conclusion and stuff like that and reveal outlines in mind then going into your exam you actually know how to plan because a lot of students actually struggle if the planning part because you don't want to sit there and plan for like 20 minutes and I realized oh my god I actually only have 25 minutes for my essay that is just not great so you really need to learn how to plan in like five minutes so you know take your phone put on a timer for five minutes and plan so if you just write two outlines a week and you just do that for like 10 minutes then you know at the end of the year you're actually going to be like the best and writing outlines because you have timed yourself every time and you will write a super fast outline that's going to be really solid and that's the perfect game plan for an essay so you know it really starts with the outline if your outline is crap your essay is going to be crap now my last tip concerns one thing that is graded in history HL where every student should theoretically get a 7 on what am I talking about the internal assessment because you have literally two years to write that internal assessment that is like 2200 words long and you know to balance wonder where it sounds like a lot but when you start writing it you're actually like whoa this is really short so yeah it's not that hard to write it and research it and you know you can write it on literally any topic so just write it on something you're actually interested in and you are good to go now why do I think everybody should get a seven on this well because you have two years time for it you're not under time pressure you can have 20 people proofread it you know you can do your research over the summer you can literally take six weeks just to write that internal assessment so why are you now taking that time maybe if my peers to try writing dear ia in like a day and I'm like well hello you know like why are you doing this like you had so much time for it so if you're in history HL student I would recommend you know taking even just a week out of your summer like a week is actually already a lot to write that internal assessment you know so you go to the library for like three days and you read a lot of books on your paper you maybe want to visit an archive and then you write down everything from your research then when you have your information you write an outline and then you just write it like doing an ia is actually not that hard it's just like a massive paper - or paper free but many students just think well I'm gonna do it some other time and you know they just let time pass and procrastinate and then in the end of the day you're like oh my god time's running out the deadlines like tomorrow and then your ia is not going to be great but your I and you can actually be your Saviour because if you mess up on one of the papers and your finals but your ia is a seven it can actually still pull you up and you can still get a seven in history so treat that ia as something that is actually there to help you now if you're like okay okay so I have my time plan here for my ia and I really have enough time to write it but I don't know how to write it well don't worry I got you I wrote you guys a little guide on how to write a perfect ia actually used a lot of you advised that my teacher gave me because I think he just gave me amazing advice for dia and I thought I'd share some of that with you guys but you know if there's anything you're unclear about about the ia it's also really important that you talk to your teacher because the teacher is supposed to supervise you on it you know if you have a great teacher who already gives you a lot of guidance really make use of it because it can help so much when there's someone who's experienced with grading is who then gives you feedback on your first draft but also before you hand in your first draft get some of your peers to read for your ia and give you some feedback because while your peers may not catch what makes you score high on the criteria off the IV they will definitely catch some grammar mistakes and things where you you were being very clear in that paragraph and your readers just like what the hell is she trying to argue there so they can really help with these little things so that your first drop is actually already a little bit better then your actually original first draft was when you hand it in to your teacher and that's always great because then your teacher can give you more sophisticated feedback doesn't have to be just like well honey like try writing some commas in those sentences it would really help you know because that's feedback that your peers could have just given you and you didn't need to waste your teachers time on it and if you waste your teachers time on it your teacher is less likely to look at things like the actual content of your ia so yeah those are all my tips we're getting a seven in history HL and the IV I hope this helps some of you guys and you guys any questions about the history course feel free to drop them in the comments below or just message me for the contact section of my blog which is linked in the infobox below thank you guys so much for watching bye

Channel: Elena Handtrack

Views: 55,811

Keywords: IB, InternationalBaccalaureate, HistoryHL

Id: 2AbgImkpsHo

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 15 2018