Why Ib History is a Pain and How to Deal with It

The IB program, considered to be the most difficult program for high school in the world definitely lives up to it’s reputation, especially in subjects like history where one has to learn history of places all across the world and in such painful scrutinizing detail that is never going to help me later.

IB history’s aims for the program are to create or inculcate analytical skills and thinking in people which are going to be extremely important for them later in life. OK fine thats well and good but why do we need to focus on single party dictatorships from across the world. If you want us to really develop analytical skill, it’s not going to come from readings books upon books of how Mao’s Cultural revolution set back China by 10 years or giving us 3 books to read on the Cold war and then using the projector to show us some presentation teaching us how to analyse the text, pictures and other resources. Thats not teaching people how to analyse;thats telling them what to right down on their question papers in their finals. 

Analysis of history is something which one has to have some amount of interest in. Take for example, i would be so interested and in fact jumping to truly analyse Ancient Egypt, their rulers, their policies and their civilization. Why is it not part of the IB syllabus? I have no clue. Ancient societies can teach us soo much and can seriously test and give us opportunities to develop our analytical skill.

Ok apart from insulting the IB history syllabus, there are many ways to do well on it:

Tips and Tricks to IB history: 

1. Dont read everything:

IB history and the quantity of the syllabus is such that if you try to read everything, you wont be able to understand the basic point better. The syllabus includes a very large number of books. It is a good idea to listen in class and mark down exactly what you need to read. You will find that in 200 page book you wont have to actually read more than 100-120 pages(reducing your work by half) because in the finals you will never be testing on small details only the main ideologies and concepts. Take for example in Chinese History for theIB, you wont need to know more than the characteristics of MAO(as a dictator), his policies, successes , failures, opponents and how his reign came to an end.