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Students taking Geography, advice?


Nabz

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I've been slacking off in Geography and i'm not proud of it at all as i know that my end is near XD but i wanted to ask whether you guys just use the IB course companion textbook or use internet links mostly to take notes etc. How useful is the textbook anyways?

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Wow! Two geography students posting on IBS - what a record.

Personally, I use way more than the Geography Course Companion (Nagle and Cooke) - it's usually sufficient for theory, but for case studies literally every candidate will have access to that text - so you'll end up with the generic case studies. Also, my rationalisation is that it will look really bad if I forget details or confuse case studies that are really popular, whereas if you miss some details in an obscure case study, it is far less obvious. Also, the theory in there sometimes is not in much detail (some syllabus dot points are not there), so you might need to go beyond it to fill in some gaps.

I would say now you need to go back to the syllabus and know the theory and one or two relevant case studies for each dot point. Use the internet to search for interesting ones - there is heaps on geography-related stuff online. To focus your memorisation, maybe focus your case studies on a region or a country - e.g. I focus on Australia, China and Bhutan for my case studies.

Then, make very short notes - that is key, have the bare minimum but good coverage. Keep your long notes if you want, but short notes are easier to memorise. By all means, use some of the case studies in the textbook, but also try and have some case studies not from the TB.

Lastly, practice is probably a good idea - questions sometimes are worded differently to the syllabus, or include synthesis across different topics - which make it far harder to answer well (especially in the long responses for each paper).

Anyway, these are other textbooks that might be useful:

- Cambridge books (Guinness) - covers Core and HL content but no options - in a lot more detail than Course Companion, so might be good for case studies

- OSC-IB study guide - short and more work-sheet style, but may be useful if you need the basic conceptual stuff

There's also some pretty neat notes on the VIP section for pretty much every geography topic (or at least the ones I do), so definitely check those out if you don't have time to make thorough notes of your own.

Good luck! I am going to try and start making my own geography notes now... I wish I could take my own advice, seriously :)

Edited by flinquinnster
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congratulation for being able to escape from IB soon:)

We are using two textbooks. One we called it "Waugh" (the author's last name), The other is called "Planet Geography", which we called "Codrington". I found both of them not so helpful..The Waugh one we don't use very frequently. "Planet Geography" lacks evidence and data that help us to answer syllabus questions, and it omits some of the sections.

I ordered an IB geo textbook published by Oxford..hope it will help.

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