From a 4 to a 6 in IB Math AA SL: what has to change, in marks

A 4 to a 6 sounds like a small step. In marks it is a specific, countable distance, and once you see where the marks are, the plan becomes much clearer. This guide is for a parent or a student who wants the number rather than the reassurance.

What the grades mean in marks

The final grade in Math AA SL comes from three parts: Paper 1 (80 marks, no calculator), Paper 2 (80 marks, calculator) and the Internal Assessment (20 marks). They are scaled and combined into a mark out of 100, and the grade boundaries are set on that scale each session.

In the May 2025 session the final boundaries were approximately: 4 from 37, 5 from 53, 6 from 67 and 7 from 80. These move a few marks either way every session, and only the coordinator has the official figures for a given exam, but the shape is stable: a 4 to a 6 is about thirty points on the final scale.

Set the IA aside for a moment, since it is usually finished or nearly finished by the final year. Each paper is 80 raw marks and counts for 40 of the 100 points, so one point on the final scale is one raw mark on each paper. A student around 43, in the lower half of the 4 band, is about twenty-four points from a 6: twenty-four extra marks on each paper. With a typical IA, that is a student scoring in the low thirties out of 80 on each paper who needs to be scoring in the mid-fifties. That is the target. Not "get better at maths": twenty-four marks per paper.

Where twenty-four marks come from

Twenty-four marks rarely come from learning one new thing. On a paper from a student at a 4, they usually come from three separate places. A typical split looks like this:

About eight marks are already being lost on questions the student can do. Sign errors in the last two lines, a second solution missed in a trig equation, a decimal given where the paper asked for an exact value, degrees where radians were needed, the chain rule skipped. These are among the cheapest marks to recover, because no new content is required. They tend to come back with practice that gets feedback and a mistake log. Where the marks go lists twelve common ones.

About eight marks are in the long questions that get abandoned. Section B of each paper has extended questions worth twelve to sixteen marks each. A student at a 4 typically gets parts (a) and (b) and stops, leaving six or eight marks on the table per question, often because part (c) uses a result from (b) that they did not trust. Learning to keep going, and to use "hence", is worth a lot of marks.

About eight marks are in one or two topics that are currently blank. Usually it is something from the middle of the syllabus that was taught during a bad month: logarithms, the binomial theorem, or integration by substitution. A blank topic on a paper costs whatever the paper chose to ask about it. Rebuilding one topic properly is often about a week of focused work.

Roughly eight marks from each place adds up to the twenty-four.

The order that works

The temptation is to start with what the class is doing now, which in the final year is calculus and statistics. Start with algebra instead. The reason is practical: most calculus and trigonometry questions finish with algebra, and a slip there costs marks on the whole question. A week on indices, surds, rearranging and solving can feel like going backwards, and is often the quickest way forward.

Then functions and their graphs, then trigonometry, then differentiation and integration, then statistics and probability. This is the order the syllabus is built in, each topic using the ones before it, and it is the order the intensive at IB Math Lab teaches in for exactly that reason.

What has to change day to day

For the student:

• Every question fully written out, on paper, every time. Method marks are real marks, and writing the method out is how students get them.
• Timed practice from the first week. Ninety minutes for eighty marks is about a minute a mark. A student who has never worked to that clock often finds it a shock in January.
• No calculator when practising Paper 1 material, ever. Many SL students find the non-calculator paper the harder one, and practising without a calculator is how they get used to it.
• A mistake log. Every lost mark on every practice paper sorted into blank, wrong method, slip, or presentation. After three papers the log is a plan.
• A full paper under conditions every two or three weeks, marked to the scheme. Not homework. A paper.

For the parent, none of which requires maths:

• Fixed evenings for the work, at the same time, in the same place, with the phone elsewhere.
• Ask to see the mark breakdown by question after each practice paper, not the total. The total hides the pattern.
• Ask, once a fortnight, what the pattern in the mistake log is now. The answer should change over time. If it does not, the practice probably needs more feedback.

How long it takes

It depends on hours, not on the calendar. The syllabus is 150 teaching hours; rebuilding the weak two-thirds of it and practising it until the slips become rare is somewhere around sixty hours of work for a student starting at a 4: roughly two-fifths of the course's teaching time, spent mostly on doing rather than listening. At seven hours a week that is eight weeks. At two hours a week it is most of the school year, and the first sign of movement on a school test comes after two or three months.

IB Math students tutored one to one by IB Math Lab's founder went from a 3 to a 5, from a 4 to a 6, from a 4 to a 5 and from a 5 to a 7. Those are one-to-one results, not results of the course. What they had in common was the three things above: a lot of time on the board, a lot of problems in a fixed order, and someone watching the working while it was written.

Where a 6 is not realistic in one term

From a 3, the algebra gap is usually larger and the blank topics more numerous; a 5 is the honest target for a term, and a 6 for May. And a student who cannot put the hours in, because of the rest of the Diploma or because the evenings are not free, is unlikely to gain twenty-four marks a paper. The hours matter most. Whether one hour a week can supply them is the question answered in what an IB Math tutor costs.