Your child was good at maths. Really good. Then Higher Level started, and now they come out of tests saying they ran out of time, or that they did not understand what the question wanted. They can still do the maths when you sit with them. So what changed? Parents searching for an IB Maths HL tutor are almost always asking this exact question, and the answer surprises most of them.
The maths did not get much harder. The questions got harder to read.
The short version
Higher Level questions hide simple maths inside long, confusing wording. Your child needs to be taught how to decode them.
What actually changes at Higher Level
Pull apart a hard HL question and you will usually find the maths inside it is something your child can already do. Compound interest. A rearranged formula. A percentage change. The difficulty is not in the calculation. It is in three paragraphs of setup, a chunk of information you do not need, and a question that never quite tells you which method to use.
One of our tutors put it plainly during a session on a loan question. The student had gone quiet, so the tutor stopped and said what was really happening.
“The way these questions get harder is, it’s less maths, just more confusing.”
Ejaz, IB Maths tutor
That is the whole problem in one line. Your child is not falling behind on content. They are being beaten by the wording, and nobody has taught them how to fight back. An IB Maths HL tutor treats decoding the question as a skill in its own right, because at Higher Level it is one.
How we teach it, and how you will know
Our tutors teach to your child’s exact syllabus and exam board, so no time goes on material that will not be assessed. They set follow-up practice on a shared board after every session and send a short written summary the same day. Therefore you can see the work rather than take our word for it. Above all, we want the method used in school the following week, not just in the lesson.
If your child is aiming for a 7, our guide on how to get a 7 in IB Maths HL goes further into what the examiners reward.
Three students an IB Maths HL tutor worked with
These are composites. Names are invented and details blended, because these are real children from real families. The teaching is exactly as it happened.
Tomas, who reached for the wrong formula
Tomas met a question about borrowing money over several years. He reached for simple interest, because that was the formula he knew best. The question wanted compound. He had not misunderstood either formula. He simply had no method for working out which one the question was asking for, so he guessed and moved on. His tutor stopped teaching formulas and started teaching the signals that tell you which formula the question wants.
Priya, who learned the mark scheme at GCSE
Priya arrived with a string of grade 9s and a real problem. At GCSE she had learned what each question type wanted and delivered it, a habit we describe in our guide to reading a GCSE maths mark scheme. IB does not work like that. The questions test whether she can apply something in a situation she has never seen. Consequently, her old method stopped working overnight, and she thought she had got worse at maths. She had not. The rules changed and nobody told her.
Elliot, who kept getting the number nearly right
Elliot understood the method every time. His answers, however, kept coming out slightly off, usually through rounding too early or trusting the calculator without sanity-checking the result. In an exam that awards method marks, this was costing him marks he had genuinely earned. His tutor taught him to estimate the answer before calculating it. Once he knew roughly what the number should be, wrong answers stopped slipping through unnoticed.
Priya’s problem is really the step up, and it catches out the strongest students hardest. We look at that shift more closely in our piece on the jump from GCSE to sixth form.
What happens in the first lesson
Your child’s tutor gives them a question and asks them to talk through it, out loud, before writing anything. This shows immediately whether they are reasoning or guessing. Next, the tutor works out which topics are genuinely weak and which only look weak because the wording defeated them. Finally, they agree what to fix first. You receive a written summary the same day.
See where the wording is costing your child
One diagnostic lesson usually shows exactly what is going wrong.
Meet three of our IB Maths tutors
Hugh
Hugh holds a doctorate from Oxford and a First Class MSci in Theoretical Physics from Imperial. He teaches IB Maths and IB Physics alongside university entrance tests. He is unusually good at taking a question that looks impossible and showing a student that the maths inside it is something they already know.
Ashruf
Ashruf read Engineering at Cambridge and finished first in his cohort for A Level Maths. He supports IB Mathematics as well as the maths admissions tests, and he is particularly strong with students who freeze on long, wordy questions. He teaches them to strip the question back before they touch a calculator.
Karol
Karol read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and is completing a teaching qualification there. He teaches IB Maths and Further Maths, and because he has trained in how maths is taught in classrooms, he is quick to spot the step a student was never actually shown.
Worth reading next
Ready to fix the reading, not just the maths?
If your child can do the maths but the grade does not show it, the wording is usually where it is going. An IB Maths HL tutor can find that out in a single lesson.
Improve your child’s IB Maths grade
START WITH A DIAGNOSTIC LESSON
Our tutors teach students to decode the question first. The maths inside is usually already there.
Frequently asked questions
