Ask a rising IB Year 2 student what they will do this summer and most say the same thing: get ahead on exam content. It sounds responsible. It is also, for many of them, the lowest-return choice on the table. The work that actually decides where they get in is sitting in a half-finished internal assessment folder, ignored.
The IB Diploma asks a lot of a teenager across two years, and the final exams feel like the whole game. They are not. By the time results arrive, the offers have already been made on the strength of predicted grades. Those predictions get locked in during the autumn of Year 2, weeks after the summer ends. What a student does over the break shapes them directly.
Your IAs are the most controllable marks you will ever earn
Here is the asymmetry every IB family should understand. Internal assessments are worth roughly a fifth to a quarter of the final grade in most subjects, and you complete them on your own schedule, with feedback, with no clock ticking in a silent hall. An exam tests what you can produce in two hours on one fixed morning, partly at the mercy of which questions appear. An IA tests what you can produce when you have time to think, draft and improve.
Students pour anxiety into the exams, the part they can least control, and treat IAs as an admin chore. That is backwards. The smartest move in the entire Diploma is to treat your IAs as the highest-priority work of the summer, because the marks are genuinely yours to take. A polished IA is the closest thing the IB offers to a guaranteed grade.
Your predicted grades are often decided by what you do in July, not by what you know in May.
How to spend the IA hours well
Summer removes the one thing that ruins IAs during term: doing them at midnight between four other deadlines. Use that. Pick the subjects where your IA is still weak or unstarted, and give each a proper run rather than a frantic patch.
For a science IA, the difference between a 5 and a 7 is rarely the experiment. It is the analysis, the error discussion, the evaluation that shows you understand why your data behaves as it does. Those sections reward unhurried thought, which is precisely what term time denies you. For the Maths IA, the trap is choosing a topic that looks impressive but gives you nothing to actually do; summer is the time to test a topic properly before you commit a month to it. For essay-based IAs in History, English or Economics, the gains come from rewriting, and rewriting needs the distance that a few quiet weeks provide.
One caution. Internal assessments are submitted through your school and run through similarity checking, and examiners are practised at spotting work that does not sound like a teenager. The summer is for doing the thinking yourself, with guidance on structure and method, not for outsourcing the writing. The grade only counts if the work is yours.
The Extended Essay quietly eats the autumn
The 4,000-word Extended Essay has a way of swallowing the first months of Year 2, exactly when you should be sharpening exam technique and presenting your best self for predicted grades. A student who arrives in September with a solid EE draft has bought back weeks of term-time bandwidth. A student who has barely started is about to spend October stressed and stretched, with everything competing at once.
You do not need to finish the EE over summer. You need to be past the hardest part: a clear research question, the bulk of your reading done, and a real draft of at least half. That alone changes how the autumn feels.
If your grades are not where they need to be
For some students, the November or following-May resit is the last swing at the grades a university offer demands. This is worth saying plainly, because schools sometimes treat resits as a quiet admission of failure. They are not. A retake taken seriously, with the specific weak paper identified and drilled over the break, can be the difference between an offer that holds and one that slips away.
The students who recover well do something specific. They get the examiner's report and the mark scheme for the paper they underperformed on, and they find the exact pattern that cost them, a topic they never secured, a question style they kept misreading, time lost in the wrong section. Vague "more revision" rarely fixes it. A targeted summer does.
The version of summer that works
A good IB summer is not eight weeks of grinding. It is a clear order of priorities. Finish the IAs that are yours to win. Get the Extended Essay over its hardest hill. Drill the specific exam weaknesses, not exams in general. Then stop, and rest properly, because Year 2 is long and a burnt-out student helps no one.
The student who treats July as the quiet, controllable part of their IB, rather than a holiday from it, walks into the offer season holding cards the exam-only student never picked up.
Common questions
How much are IB internal assessments worth?
In most subjects an internal assessment counts for roughly a fifth to a quarter of the final grade. Unlike the exams, you complete them on your own schedule with feedback and no time pressure, which makes them the most controllable marks in the entire Diploma.
Should IB students start the Extended Essay over the summer?
You do not need to finish it, but you should get past the hardest part: a clear research question, most of the reading done, and a draft of at least half. The Extended Essay tends to swallow the autumn of Year 2, exactly when predicted grades are being set, so a head-start protects your most important term.
Can you resit IB exams if your grades fall short?
Yes. Resits in November or the following May are a legitimate route to the grades a university offer requires, not an admission of failure. The students who recover well identify the exact paper and topic that cost them and drill it, rather than vaguely revising everything again.