How to Prepare for September in the IB: A Start-of-Year Guide for DP1, DP2, and Everyone New

Because the IB does not distribute its pain evenly. Look at the shape of a Diploma year: September and October are almost empty, then everything — internal assessments, the Extended Essay, mock exams, predicted grades, university deadlines — converges between November and March. Students do not usually fail because a topic was too hard. They fail because six deadlines arrived in the same fortnight and their system for handling deadlines was “remember things.”

The scale is worth knowing, because it keeps you honest about what “good” means. In the May 2026 session, 209,607 students worldwide received DP and CP results. The global average diploma score was 30.88 points, the pass rate 82.61%, and just 10,526 students — about 5% — scored above 40. The students in that top band are rarely the ones who worked the most hours. They are the ones whose Novembers were boring.

So the September question is not “how much can I study?” It is “what can I set up now that will still be running in February when I am tired?” That is a design question, and it has a research-backed answer.

You have heard that habits take 21 days. They do not. In Lally et al. (2010), 96 volunteers picked one daily behaviour and repeated it in the same context for 12 weeks. The median time to reach 95% of maximum automaticity was 66 days — with an enormous spread, from 18 days to 254. Two details matter more than the headline number. First, automaticity climbs steeply at the start and then flattens, so the early repetitions do the heavy lifting. Second, missing a single day did not measurably derail the process. One bad Tuesday is not a relapse.

Do the arithmetic on the school calendar. A routine you start in the first week of September is roughly automatic by mid-November — which, in most IB schools, is exactly when mock season, IA first drafts and university deadlines land on top of each other. A routine you start in November is still costing you willpower in February. Same routine. Completely different year.

Make it an “if-then”, not a “I really should”

The most reliable trick in the behavioural literature is embarrassingly simple: state when, where and how in advance. Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006) pooled 94 independent tests with more than 8,000 participants and found these “implementation intentions” produced a medium-to-large improvement in goal attainment (d = 0.65). Not because the plan is clever, but because it removes the daily decision.

“I will revise more this year” is a wish. “If it is 17:00 on a school day, then I sit at the kitchen table and do 25 minutes of past-paper questions on whatever we covered today” is an implementation intention. Write three. Tape them somewhere stupid and visible.

And make the 25 minutes count

What you do inside the session matters as much as showing up. Dunlosky et al. (2013) reviewed ten common study techniques and rated only two as high utility across ages, abilities and subjects: practice testing and distributed practice. Two of the most popular techniques — highlighting and rereading— came out low utility. They feel productive because familiarity feels like knowledge. It is not the same thing, and an IB paper will find the difference in about ninety seconds.

The MYP is genuinely good preparation — it is the same learner profile, the same inquiry habits, the same insistence that you justify your thinking. But three things change hard in September, and knowing which ones saves you a demoralising first report card.

1. The grades stop meaning the same thing

Both programmes use a 1–7 scale, which is the single most misleading coincidence in the IB. MYP grades come from criterion-referenced coursework assessed continuously across the year; DP grades come from a mix of internally assessed work and externally moderated final examinations, with the exams carrying most of the weight. A student who sat comfortably at 6 in MYP Language and Literature can absolutely see a 4 on their first DP report. That is not a collapse. That is a different measuring instrument.

Say this out loud to your parents in September rather than in November. Our MYP transition guide for families exists partly to have that conversation for you.

2. Everything becomes terminal

In the MYP, a weak unit gets absorbed — there is another task next month. In the DP, most of the grade sits in a two-week examination window twenty months away, which means content you meet in October 2026 is still examinable in May 2028. Nothing is ever “finished.” This is the single biggest adjustment, and it is exactly why the spaced-review habit from the previous section is not optional decoration.

3. Your Personal Project was a rehearsal

If you completed the MYP Personal Project, you have already done a supervised, self-directed, long-form independent inquiry with a reflective component. That is the Extended Essay in miniature. The skills transfer directly: scoping a question you can actually answer, keeping a research log, and being honest in your reflections. The difference is length, formality and the fact that it is worth points. Start browsing our 30 Extended Essay ideas well before your school asks you to choose.

If you are arriving from a national curriculum — A-Levels, the French system, a US high school, anything — the vocabulary alone is a wall. Here is the whole structure in ninety seconds, so that when someone says “have you started your IA?” in week three you are not quietly googling under the desk.

• Six subjects, one from each group. Studies in language and literature, language acquisition, individuals and societies, sciences, mathematics, and the arts (which you may swap for a second subject from another group).
• Three at Higher Level, three at Standard Level. HL courses are built around roughly 240 recommended teaching hours over the two years, SL around 150. HL is not “the same but harder” — it is genuinely more content and more demanding assessment.
• Each subject is graded 1–7. Six subjects × 7 = 42 points.
• The core adds up to 3 more. Theory of Knowledge (TOK) and the Extended Essay (EE) are graded A–E and combine on a matrix worth up to 3 bonus points. CAS — creativity, activity, service — is not graded, but you must complete it.
• 45 is the maximum. 24 is the minimum to pass, alongside a set of failing conditions (you need at least 12 points across your HL subjects, at least 9 across SL, no grade 1 anywhere, an E in TOK or EE is disqualifying, and CAS must be complete). Confirm the full published criteria with your coordinator.

Two internal terms you will hear constantly: IA (internal assessment — a piece of coursework in almost every subject, marked by your teacher and moderated by the IB) and predicted grades (your teachers' forecast, which universities see long before your actual results). Both are explained properly in our guide to the IA, EE and TOK, and the grading machinery is broken down in how IB exams are scored.

Still deciding whether the IB was the right call, or comparing it against AP? That is a fair question to be asking in September, and IB vs AP lays out both honestly. For the full orientation, start with what the IB Diploma Programme actually is.

DP1 feels low-stakes. There are no external exams at the end of it, most of your assessments are internal, and the finish line is nearly two years away. This is the trap. DP1 content is fully examinable in your final papers, and your DP1 performance is a large part of what your teachers draw on when they write predicted grades — the numbers universities actually see first.

So treat year one as the year you build the machine. Here is the September-to-November checklist.

One DP1-specific warning about past papers: check the syllabus year before you trust them. If your subject sits on a newly launched guide, papers from three years ago may test content and question styles that no longer exist — more on which subjects those are in the next section. When in doubt, ask your teacher which specimen papers match your guide.

If you want a realistic sense of the weekly load before you over-commit to five clubs, our study hours estimator models it against your actual subject mix.

For DP2 the calendar does something unkind: it starts at full speed. The TOK prescribed titles for the May 2027 session are released to schools through the Programme Resource Centre at the start of September 2026— conventionally 1 September, the same week you walk back through the door. From that moment the year is a sequence of fixed, immovable dates.

The three September moves that matter for DP2

• Pick your TOK title in September, not October. The titles arrive in week one and are the same for everyone in the world; the marks separate on the quality of your real-world examples and the honesty of your analysis, not on the title you chose. Pick one you can argue against as well as for. Our ultimate TOK guide walks through the whole essay, and we track each session's titles — see the November 2026 prescribed titles for how we break them down.
• Get your Extended Essay to a full first draft before the mocks. May 2027 is the first session assessed under the rebuilt EE guide — five criteria, 30 marks, a choice between the Subject-Focused and Interdisciplinary pathways, and a single final reflection. If you spent the summer on groundwork, September is for drafting; if you did not, this is your recovery window. Full breakdown in how to succeed in the new Extended Essay and the 2027 EE guide.
• Front-load the university application. Every hour of personal-statement writing you push past October collides with mocks. If you are applying to the UK, the 15 October date is a wall, not a suggestion. University counselling exists for exactly this squeeze.

If you spent July and August wondering whether you should have been working, our companion piece on the summer between DP1 and DP2 covers the groundwork version of all of this — and it is still useful in reverse, as a checklist of what to close out fast.

This is the part almost nobody tells students in September, and it changes which past papers are safe to use. Two waves of course changes are running at once.

If you are in DP2 (first assessment May 2027)

Five DP courses that began first teaching in August 2025 sit their brand-new papers for the first time in May 2027: Psychology, Computer Science, Design Technology, Visual Arts and the Extended Essay. Biology also sees a mark redistribution in Paper 2 Section B rather than a full redesign. If you take one of these, past papers from the legacy course will mislead you on format — use the specimen materials your teacher has instead, and ask which older questions are still representative.

A flavour of how deep the changes go: Design Technology drops Paper 3 entirely and unifies its SL and HL criteria around a 50-hour design project; Computer Science moves machine learning, object-oriented programming and databases into the core for everyone, with a 35-hour computational-solution IA; Psychology introduces a hypothetical research-proposal IA; and Visual Arts restructures into a new three-task model. Confirm the specifics for your own course with your teacher — the authoritative guides live behind the IB's Programme Resource Centre.

If you are in DP1 (first assessment May 2028)

The headline is History. A new DP History guide was released in February 2026 for first teaching in August 2026 — that is you — with first assessment in May 2028. It is a real redesign, not a refresh: content is organised around four concepts (cause and consequence, continuity and change, perspectives, significance), Paper 2 drops from two thematic studies to one with no prescribed examples, Paper 3 reduces to two essays from different topics, and Paper 1's large compare/contrast and OPCVL-style questions give way to more targeted questions. Practically: legacy History past papers are not your exam.

Biologyalso carries a “first assessment 2028” label with an updated data booklet, but this one is a maintenance revision — the themes, content and exam shape are the course you were expecting.

Everyone: on-screen exams are spreading

The IB began delivering on-screen DP examinations with a limited group of schools in the May 2026 session, starting with language subjects. From the November 2026 session, all IB World Schools can opt in to digital exams for Language and Literature and Language Acquisition, with a dual-running phase (paper and digital side by side) planned across the 2027, 2028 and 2029 sessions. Other subject groups are still to be confirmed.

The practical September action is a single question to your coordinator: “Is my school entering me for on-screen exams in any subject, and when?” If the answer is yes, practise typing under time now — handwriting speed and screen-reading stamina are genuinely different skills. We covered the first wave in detail in IB English B goes digital.

Whichever year you are in, this is the universal version. Two hours, once, in the first week of September. It is dull. It is also the difference between a February you can steer and a February that happens to you.

For step 6, the IB grade calculator takes about three minutes and converts your current subject grades into a projected total out of 45, including the core bonus. If building and holding this kind of system is the part you find hard — and for most students it is — that is precisely what study skills coaching is for.

• Do not build the beautiful timetable. The colour-coded, hour-by-hour, 6am-to-11pm schedule is procrastination wearing a hi-vis jacket. It survives nine days. Three if-then plans beat it comfortably.
• Do not treat DP1 as a free year. No external exams in June does not mean no consequences. DP1 content is examined in your final papers and DP1 work shapes your predicted grades.
• Do not trust past papers without checking the syllabus year. Especially in History, Psychology, Computer Science, Design Technology and Visual Arts right now. Wrong-guide practice teaches you the wrong exam.
• Do not highlight your way through the term. Highlighting and rereading were rated low utility by Dunlosky et al. (2013). They feel like learning. Retrieval is learning.
• Do not wait until it is a problem to ask for help. The gap between “this topic is confusing” and “I am behind in this subject” is about six weeks, and it is far cheaper to close in September than in March.

September asks very little of you, which is exactly why it is so easy to waste. Two hours of setup, three if-then plans, one calendar, and a habit small enough that you will still be doing it in February. That is the whole assignment. The students who cross 40 are not working three times harder in May — they built something in September that kept working while they slept.

And if the honest answer is that you would rather not design it alone: that is what we do. Bespoke Learning matches students with IB-trained educators who know the DP calendar, the new guides, and which September decisions quietly become May problems.