How to Build an IB Revision Timetable That Actually Works

The IB does not just have more content than most qualifications. It has six subjects running at once, plus internal assessments with their own deadlines, an Extended Essay, Theory of Knowledge and CAS. The revision timetable challenge isn't simply "when do I study?". It's "how do I coordinate all of this without it falling apart in April?"

To build an IB revision timetable that works: create two separate plans. First, a year-long map of every IA, EE and TOK deadline. Second, an eight-to-ten-week exam countdown schedule that gives HL subjects more sessions, prioritises your weakest topics, and uses active recall and past papers as the core method. The two plans together are what keeps exam season manageable.

Why the IB needs a different kind of timetable

Most revision timetable advice assumes one exam at the end of one year. The IB is a two-year programme with six subjects at two different levels, plus assessed coursework woven throughout. A single exam countdown schedule doesn't capture this complexity.

Two things happen to IB students who only plan the exam season:

1. Internal assessments get left late and then collide directly with revision. April or October becomes a nightmare of a half-finished Biology IA alongside half-finished History Paper 2 practice.
2. Higher Level content from Year 1 fades quietly over eighteen months. Students begin their ten-week push and realise they've forgotten entire units they haven't touched since Year 1.

Both problems are solved by planning in two layers.

Layer 1: The year-long deadline map

Before you look at any revision timetable template, map every external deadline on a single document. For May-session students, working backwards from April or May:

The point of this table is straightforward: if you know when the EE needs to be handed in, you can protect the ten weeks before exams as revision time only. Students who finish their IAs and EE early give themselves an enormous advantage, not because they are smarter, but because they have more time when it counts.

This long-horizon view is covered in more depth in the IB complete study guide. The key principle is this: treat IAs and the EE as separate projects with their own timelines, not things you squeeze in around revision.

Layer 2: The 8-week exam revision timetable

Once your coursework is under control, build the actual exam-season schedule. Eight to ten weeks before your first paper is the right starting point. That's long enough to cover all six subjects properly, and not so early that you burn out before exams begin.

Step 1: List everything that can be examined

For each of your six subjects, open the IBO subject guide (available at ibo.org) and list every topic on the syllabus. Be specific: not "Chemistry" but "equilibrium and Le Chatelier's principle". Not "English A" but "the conventions of unseen commentary for Paper 1".

This gives you a finite, countable list. The feeling of "I don't even know where to start" largely disappears when you are looking at a list, not a cloud of dread.

Step 2: Score each topic by weakness and importance

Rate every topic on two scales:

• How weak am I here? (1 = solid, 5 = almost nothing there)
• How much does it come up? (check past papers and the assessment weightings in the subject guide)

Topics that score high on both get priority. A topic you already know well needs one review session; a high-mark topic you can't explain needs four or five. John Dunlosky's 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest found that students consistently mis-distribute their study time by spending it on already-familiar material. Weighting by weakness and importance is how you avoid that trap.

Step 3: Assign sessions by subject and level

HL subjects have more content and higher assessment demands than SL. A rough guide that works for most students:

Across a typical five-day revision week this totals 14 to 22 sessions. At 45 minutes each, that's roughly 10 to 17 hours: demanding but sustainable. Do not plan seven-day weeks unless your exam session leaves you genuinely short on time. Five focused days plus lighter weekend sessions beat constant studying that gradually stops being studying.

Step 4: Build the weekly template

The shape of a good IB revision week:

• Rotate subjects daily. Never spend an entire day on one subject. Switching between unrelated subjects (say, maths and literature) forces retrieval and creates the spacing effect. Hermann Ebbinghaus documented in 1885 that content reviewed at intervals is retained far better than content reviewed in one block, and a 2006 meta-analysis by Cepeda and colleagues in Psychological Bulletin confirmed this holds across a wide range of material. Blocking all of Chemistry into Tuesday and ignoring it for the rest of the week works against your memory.
• Put your hardest HL subjects in your freshest slots. For most people, that is mid-morning. Don't coast through a subject you already find easy when your concentration is highest.
• Use active recall within every session. Write out what you know from memory first, then check the subject guide bullet points. Past-paper questions on the topic you just recalled consolidate it further. Re-reading notes alone is one of the least effective revision strategies according to Dunlosky's 2013 review: it feels like revision but moves the grade far less than retrieval practice does.
• One flexible buffer slot per day. Something always overruns. A buffer absorbs that without breaking the rest of the week.

A sample IB revision week (May session, three HL subjects)

This is a template, not a contract. If History has an exam in week 2 and Chemistry in week 7, weight more sessions towards History first, then shift to Chemistry as the countdown runs. Review and adjust the balance each Sunday for the coming week.

The part where most students struggle

Here is where revision systems usually fall apart in the IB. You build the timetable: it looks good on Sunday. By Thursday, you have a list of topics from three sessions that you got wrong, and no clear system for when to revisit them. Do you revisit History next week? The week after? Meanwhile you've half-forgotten something from Week 1 Biology. Across six subjects with different weakness profiles per topic, that tracking admin alone is a meaningful job.

That's the problem Root, our AI tutor, was built to solve. It's an adaptive tutor designed by an IB student around the IB's specific structure, and it works as an AI manager of your whole revision: you don't need to decide what to study or when to revisit something, because Root tracks your weak topics, brings them back at the right intervals through spaced repetition, and teaches you one to one when something hasn't clicked. On the free plan it has a revision mode that finds weak topics and brings them back until they hold, plus 2 exam-style practice tests a week with examiner-style per-question marking, and no card details are needed. Here is a full breakdown of what Root does if you want to see exactly how it works, and you can try it free in about two minutes.

Five common IB timetable mistakes

1. Giving every subject equal time. A struggling HL subject needs more sessions than a strong SL. Time is a resource to allocate by need, not by a sense of fairness to each subject.

2. Starting too late. "I'll begin serious revision after the February mocks" often means starting in late March, leaving six weeks for six subjects at two levels. Begin the 8-to-10-week schedule on time.

3. Treating re-reading as revision. Going through your notes feels productive because it's familiar and requires effort. But reading the same information again is one of the weakest strategies identified in Dunlosky's 2013 review. Active recall and past papers are what actually move your grade. Re-reading has its place as a five-minute orientation at the start of a session; it should not be the session itself.

4. Forgetting Year 1 HL content. Physics HL Option content from eighteen months ago will appear in your exam. Year 1 material needs to be built into your 8-week schedule from the start, in spaced repetition cycles, not crammed into the final fortnight.

5. Making the timetable too rigid. A plan with no slack collapses the first time one session overruns, which is always. Build buffer sessions in. Treat the timetable as a guide you update weekly, not a rigid contract you've failed if you deviate from once.

If exam pressure starts affecting your sleep or motivation well before the exam season, the strategies in how to avoid burnout during revision are worth reading alongside this timetable framework.

The bottom line

Building an IB revision timetable means working on two levels: a year-long deadline map so coursework doesn't crash into exam season, and an eight-to-ten-week subject schedule that gives HL subjects more time, prioritises weak topics, and uses active recall and past papers in every session. The general revision-timetable principles give you the underlying framework; combine them with the IB-specific techniques in the IB study guide for the full picture.

The timetable is the scaffold. What you do inside each session is what actually changes the grade.