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IB Math Courses




IB Math Courses

IB Math courses were divided only into higher and standard levels etc. till 2019. In 2019-20, IB introduced two flavors of Math. AA is Analysis and Approaches. AI is Application and Interpretation. Both AI and AA have further division into SL and HL. AA is more or less just the old IB Math HL. AI is significantly new. The focus is more on application oriented math. IB Math AI syllabus contains basic algebra, vectors and their applications, matrices and their applications, complex numbers and their applications, trigonometric modeling, calculus, graph theory and its applications and, last but not the least, probability statistics. Even if some topics look the same as in old IB Math or IB Math AA, their content is actually quite different. For example, IB Math AI HL does not include trigonometric identities, properties of triangle or trigonometric functions. It just focuses on graphs e.g. y = A sin (bx + c) + d and their application in modeling. 

 

(Please note that IB Math IA is different from IB Math AI. IB Math Internal Assessment (IA) is mandatory for all students choosing IB Math Analysis and Approaches or IB Math Applications and Interpretation. I will write later in a separate article how to choose IB Math Internal Assessment topics. How is IB Math IA format? And so forth.) 

 

IB past papers are useful for students choosing IB math Analysis and Approaches. For students studying IB Math Applications and Interpretation, topic wise practice from IB past papers will help to some extent. They can also solve questions from paper 3 statistics option from IB past papers. However, all of this will only cover approx. 40% of IB Math AI syllabus. (Students studying IB math Analysis and Approaches can cover more than 90% of IB Math AA HL syllabus by solving questions from IB past papers though. IB Math AA formula booklet is also quite the same as the old IB Math booklet.) 

 

For most of the major topics of IB Math Applications and Interpretation, neither ib past papers are available nor the content. These topics are graph theory and its algorithm e.g. minimum spanning tree, chinese postman problem, traveling salesman problem, Markov's chain, transition and steady state, Voronoi’s diagram and so forth. For the content and practise worksheets a student can approach some institutes or websites e.g. Ixpoe, onlinetutor4all.com etc. These institutes and websites also provide experienced and expert mentors and tutors for IB Math Applications and Interpretation and in general for IB math. They can help you get a list of questions from ib past papers relevant to IB Math Applications and Interpretation only. 

 

Overall, IB Math Applications and Interpretation is new yet easy once understood. Most of the problems are based on application and interpretation, literally. Calculator plays a very important role here. Students must be very familiar with and perhaps master their calculator especially in solving questions involving euler’s method and matrices’ operations. Roughly 25-40% marks are just based on how good you are with your calculator. 

 

Another important tip for getting a 7 in IB Math Applications and Interpretation is to read questions in IB math exam very carefully. Many questions are like a story, making one big situation connected to some real life problem. You must read the entire question as a whole. The story of a question once read and understood well makes it really easy to answer all its parts. 

 

The most important observation I had in students of IB Math Applications and Interpretation is that they remain badly confused with many important concepts under the ib math ai syllabus. These concepts are new, perhaps not well explained by school teachers and not covered in most of the textbooks and other resources of ib math. Some examples are when to divide variance by square root of n, when to divide it by (n-1) and why, when to apply CPP and TSP in graph theory questions, how to choose the new site in voronoi diagrams, how to combine two voltage signals, how to find c in y = A sin (bx + c) + d and so forth. I highly recommend that students must master these concepts instead of just learning the process by heart. For IB Math Applications and Interpretation, only 4-5 sets of ib past papers are available as of today, however it can be seen that in the questions from ib past papers, the students were tested whether they know the concepts rather than the methods. Students and parents must approach expert teachers for help as soon as possible.

 

Last but not the least, there is a great value of the hard work and efforts given by students of IB Math Applications and Interpretation. IB Math courses especially IB Math Applications and Interpretation covers statistics, matrices and probability that are core concepts of machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science. AI and ML are the future. Thus IB Math Applications and Interpretation lays a strong foundation of AI and ML for students.