Your child's IB Math grade is not moving. Here is what is usually wrong.

The tutor comes on Thursdays. The homework gets done, mostly. And the last test came back a 4 again, the same 4 as in June. You are paying, your child is trying, and nothing on the report is moving.

This is a very common situation, and it is often less about effort or ability than it looks. Three causes come up again and again. One of them is probably yours, and you can find out which without understanding a line of the maths.

Three common causes

1. The gap is earlier than the topic being taught. In the final year the class is on calculus, so the tutor teaches calculus. But look at where the marks go on the paper: often the method is right, the setup is right, and the algebra breaks in line three. A sign error when moving a term across, a bracket expanded wrong, a fraction simplified by cancelling something that cannot be cancelled. That is not a calculus problem. It is an algebra problem from earlier years, and it costs marks in every topic on the paper. It is easy for it to go unaddressed, because it is not on this term's plan.

2. The practice gets little feedback. A tutor gives one hour of contact. Then there are six days in which your child works through the exercises alone, and that is where most of the practice happens. Some students check their own working carefully and catch their slips. Many do not yet have that habit, so a mistake can be repeated for a week before anyone points it out. The next session then opens with re-explaining, and the new material gets less time.

3. The volume is not there. Math AA SL is a 150-hour course. A student at a 4 who needs a 6 has to gain about thirty marks out of a hundred (the grade boundaries make this concrete). One extra hour a week for a term is about twelve hours of contact, which is a small share of the work a gap that size usually takes.

How to tell which one it is

You do not need to know any maths for these three checks. You need a marked test and ten minutes.

Sort the lost marks. Take the last marked paper and go question by question. For each lost mark, decide which of four things happened: the question was left blank; the working is there but the method is wrong; the method is right and a slip in the algebra or arithmetic breaks it; the answer is right but marks were still lost (no working shown, decimal where an exact value was asked for, wrong rounding). A pattern usually shows within a page. Mostly slips points to cause 1. Mostly blank points to a content gap that a fixed plan through the syllabus can close. Mostly right-but-marks-lost is exam technique, which is often the quickest to fix.

Ask the tutor one question. "Which three things are costing the most marks, and what is the pattern?" A useful answer sounds like: "the algebra in the last two lines, missing the second solution in trig equations, and leaving Section B question 9 untouched." A list of topics, "trigonometry and calculus", is less useful: it usually means the pattern has not been pinned down yet, and it is worth asking for.

Ask your child to explain one question out loud. Pick a question they got wrong and say "talk me through what you were thinking." You are not checking the maths. You are listening for whether the explanation is confident and then breaks somewhere (execution) or never really starts (understanding). Students who can explain the idea but lose the marks in the working often improve quickly, because the understanding is already there.

What tends to move a grade

The IB Math students tutored one to one by IB Math Lab's founder who moved two grades had three things in common. They spent much more time working problems with a teacher looking at the working. They did many more problems, in a fixed order through the syllabus, starting with the algebra everything else depends on. And their mistakes were pointed out soon after they were made, before they turned into habits.

The order matters more than parents expect. Starting with algebra and functions before calculus can feel like going backwards. In practice it is often the quicker route, because that algebra is used in every later topic.

What to do this week

• Keep the tutor, change the brief. Ask for the next four sessions to be practice sessions: your child works through timed exam questions on paper, and the tutor watches and steps in where it goes wrong. Less new teaching until the pattern from the marked test improves. Two shorter sessions a week often work better than one long one.
• Get a full paper done under exam conditions. Ninety minutes, timed, no notes, no calculator for a Paper 1. Then have it marked properly. One real paper often says more about exam readiness than weeks of homework.
• Find out the dates. When are predicted grades submitted, and when are the mocks? The final-year timeline shows how much time there actually is.
• Decide whether the format can deliver the volume. If the pattern is slips and practice without feedback, and the target is two grades by mocks, one hour a week is unlikely to be enough on its own. The options and what they cost are in what an IB Math tutor costs.

When it is not the format

Sometimes the current arrangement is fine. A student at a 6 who wants a 7 usually needs exam technique and hard questions, and a good tutor once a week can do that. A student who is not turning up, not doing the practice, or is exhausted by the rest of the Diploma has a different problem, and more maths lessons are unlikely to solve it. And a student at HL is in a different conversation altogether: see switching between AA, AI, HL and SL.

If the grade has been flat for three months with a competent tutor, though, the format is the first thing to look at. It is also the easiest thing to change.