IB November Session 2026: How to Use the Final 3 Weeks

Quick answer

• The IB November 2026 session runs from Friday 23 October to Friday 13 November, and results reach schools on 16 December.
• With about three weeks to go, sit one timed past paper per subject now to find your gaps, then revise the gaps, not the whole course.
• Revise in exam order: Biology, Business and most Language A papers (not English A) come in the first week; Maths, Economics and Chemistry not until the third.
• Drill the command terms. The IB uses them without explanation in the papers, and answering the wrong one costs easy marks.
• No new content in the last few days. Light recall, logistics and sleep win more marks than a late cram.

If you are sitting IB exams this November, your first paper is about three weeks away, and some of your last papers are five. That gap matters more than most students realise, because it changes what you should be doing each week.

The IB November 2026 session runs from 23 October to 13 November. In the final three weeks, sit one timed past paper per subject to find your gaps, then spend most of your time on active recall of your weakest topics and on the command terms, in the order your exams fall. Stop learning new content in the final days.

This guide gives you the official dates, a week-by-week plan built around them, and the methods that the research says actually work.

When are the IB November 2026 exams?

The IB's final November 2026 examination schedule starts on Friday 23 October and ends on Friday 13 November 2026. The 23rd has only one paper (the school-based syllabus, SL paper 1). The main timetable begins on Monday 26 October.

Here is when the larger subjects fall, taken from the schedule PDF:

Not listed? Spanish A and Spanish B are 29 to 30 October, Environmental systems and societies 30 October to 2 November, Language B (except English and Spanish) and Latin 3 to 4 November, Sports, exercise and health science 4 to 5 November, English B 5 to 6 November, Digital society, Global politics and Social and cultural anthropology 6 to 9 November (Global politics HL paper 3 on 10 November), Design technology 11 to 12 November, and Philosophy 12 to 13 November.

Two details catch people out. Economics paper 2 comes the day before paper 1. And start times depend on your school's exam zone: morning papers start between 08.30 and 10.00 local time, so check yours with your IB coordinator rather than assuming 9am.

If you are in Year 1 and reading ahead, the IB's schedule document says the 2027 November session is planned for 22 October to 12 November 2027.

What makes the November session different?

The papers are set to the same standard as May; the difference is size and timing. Both sessions use the same subject guides and assessment criteria. According to the IB's assessment FAQ, grade boundaries are set mainly by reviewing candidates' work against the IB's grade descriptors, so a 7 means the same standard of work in either session.

What is different:

• It is a much smaller session. 23,392 students received November 2025 results, against 202,103 for May 2025.
• Some of you are retaking. The IB lets you retake a subject in any future session, and your highest grade for that subject counts. If you are retaking, you often have the content already; the job is finding which marks were lost and why.
• Results come before the holidays. The assessment FAQ says November results go to schools on 16 December. For the November 2025 session, the IB said students could see them on candidates.ibo.org six hours after schools, though each school could set any time from the same moment to 48 hours later.

The three-week plan, week by week

Plan backwards from your own timetable, not from the start of the session. A Biology student has three weeks; a Maths and Chemistry student has five. Use the table above to mark each subject's first paper, then follow this shape for each subject in turn.

Why start with a paper, not with notes? A paper is a diagnostic. It shows you exactly which topics and which question types cost you marks, so the next two weeks go on those and not on what you already know. Our IB mock exam strategy explains how to turn a marked paper into a list of gaps. Ask your teacher or coordinator for past papers and mark schemes, and keep a couple unseen for the final week.

Why revise in exam order? Because the session itself is spread out. Your Maths papers are on 9 and 10 November, plus 13 November if you are HL. The fortnight between your first exam and your Maths papers is real revision time, and it is wasted if you spent October treating every subject the same.

Why come back to topics, rather than finishing them? Spacing works. Cepeda and colleagues' 2006 review in Psychological Bulletin pooled 317 experiments and found that the best gap between study sessions grows with how long you need to remember something. With exams three to five weeks away, that means short gaps: come back to each weak topic every few days, not once and done. Our guide to building an IB revision timetable shows how to lay this out across six subjects.

What active recall looks like for IB content

Active recall means pulling information out of your memory before you check it, and it beats re-reading. In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 study, students who tested themselves on a passage remembered more of it two days and a week later than students who re-read it, even though re-reading made students feel more confident. A 2013 review by Dunlosky and colleagues rated practice testing and distributed practice the only two "high utility" techniques of the ten they examined; re-reading and highlighting were rated low.

What that looks like by subject:

• Essay subjects (History, Economics, English A): write essay plans from memory in five minutes: the argument, the evidence, the counter-argument. Under time pressure, a clear plan is what lets you write a structured answer.
• Sciences: close the book and explain a process or derive a relationship on a blank page, then check what you missed. If you can rebuild it, you understand it.
• Maths AA and AI: attempt full questions without looking at worked solutions. Check only once you have finished. Looking early defeats the purpose.

There is more on the method, with examples, in our active recall guide.

The command term problem

Most IB exam questions are built around a command term, and answering a different one is the easiest way to lose marks you had earned. The IB's Mathematics: applications and interpretation guide says students need to know the command terms because they "will be used without explanation in the examination papers".

The definitions in the IB's own Language A: language and literature guide show how different they are:

The fix takes about ten minutes a day. Each day, take ten questions from old papers, rotating through your subjects, cover everything except the command term and the topic, and write one line on what a full-mark answer must do before you look at the mark scheme. After a week it becomes automatic. Our IB exam technique guide covers command terms and mark schemes in more depth.

The hidden job: keeping track of it all

The method above works, but across six subjects it hands you a second job alongside the studying: keeping a list of weak topics, deciding every evening which one to revisit, re-marking your own papers against the scheme, and moving the whole plan when a school event eats a night. Root is an AI tutor and study system built for the IB by an IB student, and it keeps every class, topic, note and file in one place. Its Revision mode runs a check-up one question at a time and sorts your topics into Remembered, Shaky and Not yet, and its Test prep builds practice papers in your exam's style and marks them like an examiner against a mark scheme (the free plan includes 50 revision messages and 2 practice papers a week). On the paid plans the Planner plans the run-up to each exam around your real week, and new accounts get 5 days of Pro with it unlocked; here is everything Root does, and you can start free, no card needed.

The final days before each paper

Stop learning new content and protect your sleep. The night before a paper is for light recall of that paper's topics and nothing else. Our guide to sleep and studying explains the research on sleep and memory, and why an all-nighter costs you more than it gives.

Logistics are worth ten minutes now:

• Confirm your exam zone start time and room with your coordinator.
• Check which calculator you are allowed for Maths and the sciences.
• Put every paper from the schedule into your phone calendar, including the ones on afternoons.

So, in short: find your gaps early, work on them in exam order, and arrive at each paper rested. For the full method beyond these weeks, see how to revise for IB exams.