Final PSE Reflection

Throughout the last year, there have been many challenges and new experiences that I have endured. I was a new student at the start of the year, and had to go through the whole process of making friends all over again. Perhaps, I made friends quicker than most, but it was difficult to get accustomed to the nature and the layout of the school. I think another challenge was adjusting to my IB schedule whilst trying to remain positive and not let my schoolwork overload and impact other areas of my life. The biggest thing I’m looking forward to in Grade 12, is sort of the ability to be able to reflect on the journey of my education and its finality and completion.

G11 Internal Exams Reflection

We just finished our exams in which we got a bit of a taster on what to expect for next year. I personally, had to take exams for five of my subjects, HL Chemistry and Psychology and SL Maths, Music and Mandarin ab initio; all except for HL English Language & Literature because we did our IOCs the week before the exam.

 

In terms of my study plan for this exam, I studied the most for Psychology as it had the most content to revise. I tried a new technique with this exam; instead of writing and re-writing pages and pages of information, I created mind-maps which allowed me to visualise the concepts and see their interconnectedness. This also helped me process the information and really “encode” it in my brain. For Chemistry, Maths, and Music, I did practice questions and past papers, in order to revise and revisit the skills, principles and terminology acquired over the past year. For Mandarin, I took an unorthodox approach; for most of my revision for this subject I studied the sentence structures as well as the formatting for the different text types. This helped as I was comfortable with the vocabulary (which I still studied, of course) but often made mistakes in my structuring of sentences.

 

Overall, I felt my exams went well. I felt my music and maths scores could have been higher, but I will try and use it as motivation for next time. Also, due to this being my first time, and the weight that was on these exams, I felt that I coped well. I think my preparation technique was effective but I feel that next time I should be more in-depth in my writing and perhaps try to “glance” at every concept instead of assuming my knowledge.