IB Diploma Programme Support

What most distinguishes the IB Diploma from a system like A-Levels isn't difficulty so much as breadth: where A-Level students typically specialize into three or four subjects, IB Diploma students take six across six mandated subject groups — a first language, a second language, individuals and societies (history, economics, and similar), sciences, mathematics, and an elective, often the arts or a second subject from another group.

That structure is deliberate — the IB's stated aim is to keep students working across humanities and sciences simultaneously right up to university entry, rather than narrowing early. Layered on top of the six subjects is a core that doesn't exist in most other systems: Theory of Knowledge, an epistemology course examining how we know what we claim to know across different areas of knowledge; the Extended Essay, a roughly 4,000-word independent research paper on a topic of the student's choosing; and CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service), a non-examined component tracking involvement outside the classroom.

All of this is scored out of 45 points — up to 7 per subject across the six, plus up to 3 bonus points from TOK and the Extended Essay combined — with most competitive universities looking for a score well above the minimum needed to be awarded the diploma at all. TutorA currently has dedicated, subject-specific tutor pages for IB Math, IB Physics, and IB Chemistry, each with its own real curriculum detail; for other Diploma subjects — a humanities subject, a language, an elective — our general request flow can still match a suitable tutor, and it's worth specifying the subject group and HL/SL level so the request routes correctly.