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The key benefits of an IB tutor & should you get one?

Writer's picture: Excel Academic Education Excel Academic Education

The IB curriculum is a very vigorous one, where internal assessments count for 20% of the final grade while final examinations count for 80% of the final grade. The IB used a curve system, where every year, only small percentage of students can get the top marks. Due to this high level of competition, an IB tutor can really help a student to stand out from the competition.


What are the key benefits of having an IB tutor?


1.Peace of mind

An ideal tutor will explain all concepts for you in an easy to understand manner and answer any questions that you have. Without an IB tutor, there can often be tremendous stress for an IB student. An IB student can often feel like he's left alone without support without a tutor. An ideal tutor should make the student feel like the subject is easier than ever and be able to install confidence.


2. Much more free time

A good tutor should be able speed up learning for a student dramatically. For example a student might need 10 hours to understand a topic by himself by studying a textbook. However, with a tutor, he can understand the same concepts in just 2 hours. This basically means that the student can master more concepts in a shorter time frame. In the IB, students need to handle 6 subjects at the same time. It can often be overwhelming. Getting a tutor for subjects you are weak at can give you so much more free time to achieve a better result


3.Better results

The key reason most students want a tutor is to boost their exam scores. A good tutor will have rich experience with IB exams and the IB curriculum and be able to guide you through all the assessments. For math and science subjects, a great tutor will be able to tell you exactly the question types that can show up for each topic and the best way to solve each type of question. The tutor will be able to help you to narrow your focus of your studies. For humanity and language subjects, essay questions are the most common evaluation tool. In these cases, a great tutor would be able to teach you how to structure your essay and how to approach the various types of questions.

Basically, a great tutor will show you how to ace the exam based on his or her experience.


So should you get an IB tutor?


The IB program is a rigorous one, and requires a subject expert to teach it. Hence, normally each IB tutor can only teach 1 or at most 2 subjects. This means that you need different tutors for different subjects.


We do not suggest IB students to get a tutor for all subjects, because there are only 7 days in a week. Getting a tutor for each subjects means at least 6 hours of tutoring every week. This can be too much for one student. After all, students need independent time to revise and work on internal assessments as well.


However, based on our observation, many elite IB students have a tutor for at least 2 to 4 of their subjects. For example, one of our 45/45 IB graduate in class of 2018, had classes with us for chemistry, biology and mathematics.


Which subjects should you get an IB tutor for? Every student has some subjects that they are more inclined towards. For example, some students are more natural inclined to the sciences, while others are more fond of the languages. If you can handle a subject by yourself confidently, you can consider tackling the subject by your own. However, there must be at least 1 subject that you really dislike and find confusing. For these kinds of subject, getting a tutor can really go a long mile.


For your weak subjects, we suggest you to have regular tuition once a week to make sure you are on track in terms of your learning progress. For your stronger subjects, we suggest you to join tuition when you need help for a particular exam or assessment, to brush up your exam skills.



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