What To Expect When Joining The IB (IB1)

IB1 is the big year of change. Your teacher starts loading on the Internal Assessments (IAs), expects you to have an idea for you Extended Essay (EE), you should start and finish your TOK Oral Presentation, you have Written Assignments due, and finally you start having your Individual Oral Commentaries for your language subjects!

It's definitely a stressful workload to start off with, and most students are left unprepared. Even then, I still found IB1 to be my most enjoyable year in high school, since I still had the opportunity to travel all over Europe (check out this link to find out how EYP helped me do this!) and start working part-time, while balancing my studies. Because of all of this, I'd say my experience in IB1 was also the most mixed year ever, with lots of highs and lots of lows.

To make the process of you going to IB1 easier, today I'll be answering the essential question: what should you expect when you go to IB1? 

Initial EE Planning is quite easy, so no panic

Many people are super stressed when they enter IB1 thinking they need to have a clear idea of the subject they want to do and topic to cover. When the time comes that teachers start pressuring you to find a supervisor, this panic soars and everyone is scrambling to find a "good" teacher to supervise them before they're snapped up by another classmate. But, honestly, the EE doesn't need to be stressed about so much in IB1. You have plenty of months to get started with the process, and nearly all of my classmates changed their EE ideas at least once within the few months of the process. If you don't find an awesome supervisor (like myself), that's totally okay. It's possible to get high scores without a brilliant supervisor. The subject you choose is also able to change, even if it doesn't feel like it because of what your teachers tell you. Unless you've confirmed your subject with the IB itself (which happens in IB2), you're able to change your EE subject if it's causing you to have breakdowns or stop sleeping because it simply isn't working out. 

IB1 is the time for experimentation of what you do and don't like. The initial stages of the EE planning process take time and many switches and changes, but it is definitely something you shouldn't stress about as there are other, more important things, that you should be focusing on. 

Take some time to understand TOK to do well in your Oral Presentation. But, if you screw up, you'll still be just fine!

I remember when I started the TOK Presentation, I thought that it would weigh a massive amount on my final TOK grade and stressed majorly over it. This stress was heightened when my group members had no clue what we were meant to do because they didn't understand TOK concepts fully in the first place. However, this resulted in me overcompensating and spending lots of time freaking out about it. As I said in my advice on TOK, follow the outline clearly and ask questions from your TOK teacher if you're unsure. My TOK Presentation went completely fine (I got 9/10), however, as my TOK teacher would later say, we actually might've included too much information and analysed it too much. She essentially said that the amount I included could've been reduced, and I still would've gotten the same grade.

Why I said that "if you screw up, you'll still be alright" is because, realistically, the Presentation is only worth 1/3 of your total TOK grade and your TOK grade is only 50% of the extra 3 possible points (your TOK/EE grade). Therefore, your whole TOK grade is worth a maximum of 1.5 points, making your TOK presentation worth 0.495 points out of your whole IB final grade! You can look at the presentation as something that can cushion your fall if an IA screws up, for instance. Looking at the fact it's really worth just shy of half of 1 point, you'll see how your panicky energy could better be used for your other subjects and acing your IAs!

Your IAs are probably the most stressful part of IB1

I'll be honest, I really underestimated how stressful the IAs were when I was in Pre-IB. Sure, whenever an older student was asked "How are you?", they'd respond with something along the lines of being totally stressed out over the IAs. Even then, I didn't really understand how the IAs could be stressful, especially since they're only around 20% of your final grade for each subject. You could totally just screw up your IA, and still do well in your final exams to get a decent grade, right?

Well, in theory that does make sense, but doesn't exactly work in practice. The IAs are a component that your teachers expect you to complete largely outside of class time and this becomes very stressful, considering you've got presentations, Written Assignments and CAS to complete outside of class time as well. Because of this, the IAs aren't inherently stressful, but realising you're now very suddenly placed in a position where you might have to do 4 of them simultaneously along with all of the other assignments makes them feel completely overwhelming.

Here's a way you can make IAs less stressful:
The main thing I took away from doing the IAs was that it forces to reevaluate your priorities. Be prepared that the IAs are as stressful as you make them out to be. Evaluate:

1. which subjects' grades you need to pull up through a good IA
2. which subjects you need to do especially well in for university Predicted Grades (PGs)

Based on these 2 things, you can even write a list of IAs from most important to least important. You can always come back to this list when things feel stressful so you can see what your priorities are. This helped me a lot to see how no IA is equal: you need to see them as assignments of different value, and you yourself can determine how valuable a certain IA is.

You get to edit your Written Assignments again and again, but don't get too complacent with your Written Assignments during IB1!

During Pre-IB and IB1, you'll probably be asked to complete assignments called Written Tasks (WTs) or Written Assignments for your Language A subjects. For English Lang&Lit, WTs have been replaced by Portfolios, which have a similar timeline so I wouldn't entirely ignore this warning. 

In the past, WTs are 2 assignments you send to your teachers on 2 occasions. On the first occasion, you send it in for comments and concrete recommendations from the teacher on what to change or delete. On the second occasion, you send in a completed version of the WT. These two occasions are usually spread many, many months apart and many students forget they had to edit the WT or even the comments their teacher gave them (myself included). 

While you get a lot of time to edit it, try edit it as soon as you get the comments! When you initially get feedback from your teacher, it's usually way before any stressful assignments (like IAs) come up, so getting it done there and then is definitely your best course of action. Then, around the time the WT needs to be submitted officially, you just need to look through it for missing citations or misspellings if needed! 

I personally was incredibly stressed about my 2 WTs and pulled an all-nighter to edit and fix them up. While I ended up spending many hours on them, they ended up being pretty much rubbish, so I would really just edit them as soon as you have your comments and get it over with ASAP.

Orals are a source of panic for many, but doing poorly on them is usually due to you stressing out about them rather than how much you know.

Orals, known officially as Individual Oral Commentaries and shortened as IOCs, are these components that you do for all your language subjects. Since this is considered by almost all language students as one of the most stressful components of the languages, I'll give a quick summary of what they are and my advice as to how to tackle them without panicking.

Summary of what Orals are:

10%-20% of your final grade from language subjects is made up of the grade you get for your Oral. In your Oral, you basically spend 10-15 minutes talking with your teacher and analysing a certain work/picture. Your IOC grade can be based on you talking about all sorts of things, like:

1. a random image
2. a poem studied in class
3. an extract from a book studied in class
4. questions on a topic you've studied in class

What combination of these options is decided by the subject you take. For example, for English A Lang&Lit:

1. We had either a poem or book from our classes we needed to analyse for 10 minutes.
2. After that, the teacher asked us questions about the work we analysed for another 5 minutes.

For my Finnish B class:

1. We were given a random image to analyse out loud to the teacher for around 5 minutes
2. We had another 5 minutes where the teacher asked questions about the image
3. Then, we had a final 5 minutes asking questions about a totally unrelated subject that's been studied at some point during class time. 

Here's my advice for your Orals

I ended up getting a 7 for my English A Oral (out of maximum 7), and that was largely due to me actually just studying the material I needed rather than recording myself doing Orals at home, like some of my classmates did. I have to say, though, that those same classmates scored similarly by practicing recording themselves analysing out loud. The reason I specifically chose not to record myself is because I knew screwing up the Oral at home, as I would most likely do, would stress me out about doing the Oral in front of the teacher. This ended up going fine, as long as I studied the material pretty in-depth. 

Therefore, I wouldn't just trust what those on IB forums say when they claim you can't do well on an IOC without recording yourself many times beforehand. For some, this works, and for others (like me), it doesn't work at all. Try different things, and gauge what feels the least stressful for a person like you.

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