IB Past Papers VS Question Banks

[Rosalina]

I know I'm asking this a year earlier than I should be but can anyone tell me the difference between question banks and Past papers? I know past papers are the actual tests administered by the IB but are question banks a collection of the questions? Or are they just practice questions made up by the teacher as a review of sorts? Should I purchase past papers or will having some question banks suffice?

 

 

Thank you for your time.

[Vioh]

I know I'm asking this a year earlier than I should be but can anyone tell me the difference between question banks and Past papers? I know past papers are the actual tests administered by the IB but are question banks a collection of the questions? Or are they just practice questions made up by the teacher as a review of sorts? Should I purchase past papers or will having some question banks suffice?

 

The questions in the question banks are actually taken from past papers, so yep they are technically the same thing. However, as far as I know, the latest version of the question banks is the third edition, which only contains questions from very old exams (i.e. it will not contain questions for the new syllabus). So it would be good if you try to get hold of more recent exam papers (for example, since your exam is in May 2016, it might be good to get May/Nov 2014 and May/Nov 2015 papers). Use these together with the questions banks, and you'll be fine. One more thing, if i'm not mistaken, there are no question banks for language or social science subjects (e.g. English, history, philosophy, etc).

PS: somewhere out there in the internet, there will always be people who'd like to share things for free..... and perhaps Googlebot can crawl them out

[Rosalina]

 

I know I'm asking this a year earlier than I should be but can anyone tell me the difference between question banks and Past papers? I know past papers are the actual tests administered by the IB but are question banks a collection of the questions? Or are they just practice questions made up by the teacher as a review of sorts? Should I purchase past papers or will having some question banks suffice?

 

The questions in the question banks are actually taken from past papers, so yep they are technically the same thing. However, as far as I know, the latest version of the question banks is the third edition, which only contains questions from very old exams (i.e. it will not contain questions for the new syllabus). So it would be good if you try to get hold of more recent exam papers (for example, since your exam is in May 2016, it might be good to get May/Nov 2014 and May/Nov 2015 papers). Use these together with the questions banks, and you'll be fine. One more thing, if i'm not mistaken, there are no question banks for language or social science subjects (e.g. English, history, philosophy, etc).

PS: somewhere out there in the internet, there will always be people who'd like to share things for free..... and perhaps Googlebot can crawl them out

 

 

As I'm writing the 2017 exams, I wouldn't have access to past papers due to the curriculum having been changed for the 2017 session. That is, if I'm not mixing my class with the 2016 one....

[kw0573]

 

 

I know I'm asking this a year earlier than I should be but can anyone tell me the difference between question banks and Past papers? I know past papers are the actual tests administered by the IB but are question banks a collection of the questions? Or are they just practice questions made up by the teacher as a review of sorts? Should I purchase past papers or will having some question banks suffice?

 

The questions in the question banks are actually taken from past papers, so yep they are technically the same thing. However, as far as I know, the latest version of the question banks is the third edition, which only contains questions from very old exams (i.e. it will not contain questions for the new syllabus). So it would be good if you try to get hold of more recent exam papers (for example, since your exam is in May 2016, it might be good to get May/Nov 2014 and May/Nov 2015 papers). Use these together with the questions banks, and you'll be fine. One more thing, if i'm not mistaken, there are no question banks for language or social science subjects (e.g. English, history, philosophy, etc).

PS: somewhere out there in the internet, there will always be people who'd like to share things for free..... and perhaps Googlebot can crawl them out

 

 

As I'm writing the 2017 exams, I wouldn't have access to past papers due to the curriculum having been changed for the 2017 session. That is, if I'm not mixing my class with the 2016 one....

 

In another post, Vioh shared some specimen papers so that's better than nothing.

Group 1/3 do have questionbank, right now they are just online, and I don't know of offline versions.

A QB has the following additional features to past papers and markscheme

- 1-7 cutoffs

- percentage of candidates picking each choice / left blank

- examiner's comments/remarks to extreme questions such as a lot of people pick a different answer, or if individual subcontracted examiners noted some issues with the exam

- ability to easily search through the exams (typically over 3 years), by topic in the syllabus, session, paper, SL/HL, 

- overall remarks about each exam, areas where students did well/poorly

I honestly don't recommend purchasing past papers because many popular subject's will have entire past papers online. Couple afternoons you should be able to find them. Popular ones include math (esp SL and HL, studies and further are bit harder to find), chemistry, physics, biology (somewhat). I don't look for past papers in other subjects so I can't make promises.