From Toronto to Thessaloniki and Lille: A Global Passport with the IB

A middle-school teacher in Toronto noticed Maria was outpacing her classes and suggested she look at something more challenging. That single recommendation eventually carried her through two countries (soon to be three), six subjects, and a final score of 40/45. Just recently, she celebrated an unconditional offer from EDHEC Business School in France waiting on the other side.

Two Classrooms, One Curriculum

Maria started the IB at a public school in Toronto and by the end of the first year, carried her IB focus through to an English language school in Thessaloniki, Greece - her home country. In the middle of a major move, the curriculum was the one thing that didn't change.

The approach to learning however, differed. Compared to what might be described as lecture-style teaching at her former school in Canada, was contrasted by a Socratic approach to the classroom in Greece. Students were expected to answer out loud and to openly discuss their reasoning - building critical thinking muscle.

Before Maria began the IB, nobody else in her family had pursued it. There was no one at home to ask about IAs, subject choices, or what any of the acronyms meant. She leaned on the IB2 seniors instead - the students a year ahead who'd already made it through.

Building a Subject Group Around What Actually Fit

Maria's six subjects reflected a deliberate mix of ambition and self-awareness. Business Management HL gave her a foundation for the marketing and consumer-facing career she was already imagining, inspired partly by her father's own business. French B HL let her build on a fluency she'd developed through French immersion schooling in Canada, even though by her own admission, she hadn't spoken a word of French in over a year before walking into her IB French class.

For her Group 4 subject, Maria chose Environmental Systems and Societies, which, which she picked expecting an "easier science" option and ended up counting among her favourite classes.She discovered she could apply what she learned in ESS throughout her life. In fact, she used Thessaloniki's own port and its history of eutrophication as a real case study for her exams, and found herself explaining ecosystem dynamics to her dad on a family trip to the zoo.

Rounding out her subjects: Mathematics AA at SL, English A Language and Literature HL, and Dance SL; the latter because of a childhood love of dance and the need to maintain balance across other more academically rigorous courses.

Her results: a 6 in Business Management, a 6 in English A, a 7 in French B, a 6 in Mathematics AA, a 7 in Dance, and a 7 in ESS - a 40/45 overall, alongside a B in Theory of Knowledge and a D in her Extended Essay.

Where the Pressure Showed Up

Ask Maria where sh40e felt most tested, and it wasn't the exam content so much as the Mathematics internal assessment process. She and her cohort kept revising their IAs without seeing their marks improve, and struggled to pin down exactly how the assessment criteria were being applied. It's a familiar frustration for IB students: understanding the material is one thing, but understanding what examiners are specifically looking for in an IA is a different skill entirely.

That gap is part of why she leaned on Revision Village's Question Bank so consistently for both Mathematics and ESS. Rather than using it to learn new content, she revisited it to keep testing her understanding against real exam-style questions.

Revision Used Consistently

Maria's introduction to Revision Village happened before she even knew the platform's name - her maths teacher was already assigning questions from it in class. It was the senior students who eventually pointed her to the site directly, and from there she accessed it for the full two years of the Diploma.

Her mostly used resource was the Questionbank, especially for Mathematics and ESS. For Business Management, where she found herself mixing up similar-sounding terminology, she turned to Flashcards - something she described as ideal for low-effort, high-repetition review. She'd go through them on the bus, or the morning before a test, just to refresh a concept in her mind before walking into the exam room.

Results Day

Maria found out her results at exactly 9 a.m. She and her friend had organised a call so they could reveal their scores at the same time. The milestone moment was one of the most rewarding of the whole process for Maria, made better by sharing it with the people who'd gone through the two years alongside her.

The final ‘40’ too brought real relief, but it also came with a Business Management grade one point off the next boundary, and an Extended Essay grade ‘D’ that surprised both her and the teacher who had supervised her research. Rather than let it define how she felt about her result, she settled on a positive perspective: it wasn't going to change the direction of her life, and she could carry on.

What She’d Tell a Student Starting IB1

Asked what she would tell incoming IB1 students, Maria didn't point to a study hack. Instead she recommended they build a habit around maintaining pace, consistency, and protecting the things outside the Diploma that keep students grounded - in her case, the dance practice she'd kept since childhood and continued to make time for throughout both years.

Maria is headed to EDHEC Business School's Lille, France campus this year, with an eye on consumer behaviour, market analysis, or product development for an organisation that champions social responsibility.

It is clear she's already built habits and characteristics - curiosity, consistency, and global citizenship to leave an inspiring mark on the community around her.