IB Diploma · the summer before DP1, and the summer between DP1 and DP2

Make the most of summer to prepare for the IB

Updated 17 August 2026 · 12 min read · Two tracks: starting the Diploma, or going into the final year

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Every article on this subject tells you to read ahead, work through the textbook and get a head start. The evidence does not support that, and we would rather say so. What the evidence does support is a mostly relaxed summer with four decisions in it — decisions that cost almost no time and set the ceiling on the twelve months that follow. There is also a piece of news most families have not heard: the students going into DP2 this August are the first cohort in the world to be assessed on a rewritten Extended Essay.

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If a summer block is the right answer — usually it is mathematics fluency, a language, or Extended Essay direction — tuition is CHF 95 an hour, and IB Higher Level sits in that tier rather than above it. Our most accomplished tutors are CHF 130, on any work, by your choice. CHF 85 for a learner aged 10 or under. All-in, per 60 full minutes, at a Swiss address, a holiday address or online, at the same price.

An IB Diploma student in Switzerland working outdoors during the summer holidays New EE, first assessment May 2027
Nine weeks, not six ICS Zurich runs 17 June to 17 August 2027. Canton Zurich’s state break is 19 July to 21 August. Every generic IB summer plan is written for a six-week holiday your child probably does not have.
It has actual dates in itExam session windows, Swiss cantonal holidays and international-school calendars. Not one of the six competing articles we read carries a single date.
It separates IB deadlines from school deadlinesThe deadline your child is panicking about in October is almost certainly the school’s, set deliberately months before the IB’s. Knowing which is which changes what the summer is for.
It says a relaxed summer is fineBecause the evidence says so, and because the cohort this is written for already carries two to three times the baseline rate of anxiety and depression. Doing less, better, is the recommendation.

The short answer

Rest properly, and make four decisions

Take two to three weeks completely off. Then, across the rest of the holiday, do four things that take a few hours a month between them: settle the Extended Essay question and read six to ten sources for it, choose the Internal Assessment topics, rebuild algebraic fluency if mathematics is a Higher Level subject, and keep one language ticking over with short spaced sessions rather than long ones.

Do not pre-learn the DP2 syllabus, do not work through past papers on content not yet taught, and do not reread the textbook. Those are the three most commonly given pieces of IB summer advice and they are the three the research is least kind to. Summer learning loss in this age group is small, unmeasured and shrinking with age; front-loading content fades out; and rereading is rated low-utility in every serious review of study technique.

The summer before DP1

The job is arriving rested and choosing well. The most consequential decision of the whole summer is the Higher Level combination — because at least one Higher Level subject must be mathematics or a natural science for any Swiss university to admit you, and that is fixed at course selection rather than at results.

The summer between DP1 and DP2

The job is the Extended Essay question and the Internal Assessment topics. Both are cheap in hours and expensive in consequence: the topic sets the ceiling on the marks reachable before a word is written.

What can wait until September

Everything else. The Extended Essay is 40 hours of student work spread across a year, not a summer project, and the new Reflection criterion rewards genuine development rather than a rushed draft that gets binned in October.

The news

The Extended Essay changed, and the advice online has not

A new Extended Essay guide was published in February 2025, with first assessment in May 2027. Essays submitted in 2026 use the 2018 guide; work submitted from May 2027 onward uses the new one. That means the students starting DP2 this August are the first cohort anywhere to be assessed under it — and every EE guide written before 2025, including the ones currently ranking for this search, is describing the old version.

What changedThe detailWhat it means for the summer
Two pathways, presented as equalSubject-focused, using one Diploma subject, or interdisciplinary, integrating the lenses of two. The old World Studies essay is absorbed into the interdisciplinary routeAn interdisciplinary question is harder to scope than a single-subject one. If your child is considering it, the summer is when that thinking has to happen
Five criteria, 30 marksFramework for the essay (6) · Knowledge and understanding (6) · Analysis and line of argument (6) · Discussion and evaluation (8) · Reflection (4)Six of the thirty marks reward the research question, method and structure — precisely the judgement that improves with unhurried time and degrades under October pressure
Reflection is now assessed as growthThe reflection marks address the development of the student and the transferable skills learnedA rushed summer draft written from sources that were not properly read is worse than no draft, because the reflection has nothing honest to describe
Categories removed from language essaysLanguage A and Language B essays no longer sit in categoriesOne fewer constraint at the question-setting stage, which is a real simplification

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Sources: the IB’s published Extended Essay updates and the first-assessment-2027 guide. Zurich International School’s library guide records the same dates. The guide describes roughly 40 hours of student work, 3 to 5 hours of supervisor support, a maximum of 4,000 words plus a reflective statement of no more than 500 words, and three reflection sessions of which the last is the viva voce — confirm the reflection-session count against your school’s Reflections and Progress Form, as one third-party summary describes it differently.

The distinction nobody explains

Most of the deadlines frightening your child are your school’s, not the IB’s

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and it comes straight from the IB. The organisation sets a submission date and communicates it to schools — and it strongly recommends that schools set their own internal deadlines for the stages of producing the essay. So schools do, months earlier, deliberately, to leave marking time.

Set by the IB, globally fixed

The May examination session window. The Extended Essay submission date to the IB. Word limits, criteria and reflection requirements. The TOK essay word limit and the prescribed titles. The CAS learning outcomes and the requirement for a project.

Set by your school, and variable

Every Extended Essay draft deadline. Every Internal Assessment deadline. When the TOK exhibition happens. When CAS activities are logged. When mocks are sat. None of these is an IB date, and none of them is the same at two schools.

Which is why the summer starts with an email

Ask the Diploma Programme Coordinator for the school’s published Extended Essay and Internal Assessment calendar before you plan anything. We could not find a single Swiss school publishing one openly — they live behind ManageBac — so it is a request, not a search.

The Swiss calendar

Your child has nine weeks. The advice assumes six

Swiss IB students are mostly not on the cantonal calendar, and the gap is larger than anyone writing about this seems to know. That changes the plan: it makes taking two to three weeks entirely off trivially affordable, and it puts the real Extended Essay window in late July rather than in the last week of August.

CalendarSummer 2027Consequence
ICS Zurich (international)Ends 17 June 2027, starts 17 August 2026 for the following yearAbout nine weeks — three more than a generic guide assumes, starting a month earlier
Canton Zurich (state)19 July to 21 August 2027About five weeks, and starting a month later than the international schools in the same canton
Vaud3 July to 22 August 2027Seven weeks
Geneva5 July to 25 August 2027Seven weeks; the latest state rentrée in French-speaking Switzerland
IB May session24 April to 20 May 2026 was the last confirmed window; May 2027 is reported as 23 April to 19 MayVerify May 2027 against the IB’s own published schedule before planning around it — we could only confirm it from a third party

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Cantonal education department calendars and ICS Zurich’s published school calendar, read 17 August 2026. Switzerland has 52 IB World Schools, 50 of them authorised for the Diploma Programme — and the International School of Geneva, where the IB itself began, is among them.

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Prices and packages

What tutoring costs, and how long you have to use it

Most of this article argues for a quieter summer, not a busier one. Where a summer block genuinely earns its place it is one of three things: rebuilding mathematical fluency before a Higher Level year, a language that has to move from B2 towards C1 for a Swiss university, or an Extended Essay question that has been circling for weeks without landing. Hours are bought prepaid in blocks of 5, 10 or 20, the best-rate clock pauses over your own school’s holidays, and the package stays valid for twelve months — so hours bought in July can be spent in February when the Internal Assessment deadline actually arrives.

Specialist — CHF 95 an hour. Where all Diploma work sits, Higher Level included. Standard Level and Higher Level are the same tier here — we do not charge more because a syllabus is harder.

5 hours

Best rate held 1 month · package valid 12 months

CHF 475

CHF 440

CHF 88 an hour

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  • An Extended Essay question scoped, with the reading planned
  • 3–4 sessions of 90 minutes
  • At a Swiss address, a holiday address or online, same price
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Most families choose this

10 hours

Best rate held 2 months · package valid 12 months

CHF 950

CHF 810

CHF 81 an hour

You save CHF 140
  • Algebraic fluency rebuilt before a Higher Level year
  • 6–7 sessions of 90 minutes
  • The rate clock pauses over your school’s holidays
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20 hours

Best rate held 3 months · package valid 12 months

CHF 1,900

CHF 1,560

CHF 78 an hour

You save CHF 340
  • A full run across the DP2 year on the subject that decides the total
  • 13–14 sessions of 90 minutes
  • Our lowest hourly figure
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The single-hour Specialist rate. Buy a package afterwards and it comes straight off, so the hour you already had is re-priced at the package rate too.

CHF 95

A full year to use your package. Your best rate held for up to three months.

Two clocks run and they do different things. The best-rate window is one month on five hours, two on ten and three on twenty — and it pauses automatically over your own canton’s school holidays. If it closes, nothing is taken: the hours you have already had are recalculated at the standard rate and the balance stays on your account. The package itself stays valid for twelve months, and we write to you at nine months and again at eleven, unprompted, while there is still time to use it.

What happens if the first lesson disappoints you?

Two guarantees, and you choose between them. We never choose for you, and we never steer you towards the one that suits us.

Not right? Your money back.

If the first lesson on your package does not meet your expectations for how well your tutor knows the subject, or for how they conduct themselves, the whole package goes back on your card — including the lesson you have already had. No questions and no conditions.

Or carry on with someone else.

Would you rather stay? We assign a different tutor and credit that hour back to your package, so nothing is lost. This one is available again on the first lesson with each newly assigned tutor.

Fourteen days to change your mind

Bought a package and had second thoughts before any lesson happened? Full refund to the card within 14 days. Switzerland gives no statutory right of withdrawal on an online purchase, so this is ours voluntarily.

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Cancel or reschedule until 17:00 the day before and the session is not deducted from your package. There is no minimum term, no notice period and no enrolment fee.

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Worth doing

Four things that earn their place, and why

Each of these is cheap in hours and consequential in marks. That combination is what makes them worth a holiday.

Settle the Extended Essay question — the highest-leverage hours of the summerSix of the essay’s thirty marks now sit under “Framework for the essay”: the research question, the method and the structural conventions. That is exactly the kind of judgement that improves with unhurried time and collapses under deadline pressure. The deliverable for the summer is a draft question, six to ten sources actually read, and an outline. Not four thousand words.
Choose the Internal Assessment topicsInternal Assessments are teacher-marked and IB-moderated, and the topic decides what marks are reachable before anything is written. Most of them cannot be produced early — the sciences need data not yet collected, mathematics needs content not yet taught — so the summer job is choosing well, not producing.
Rebuild algebraic fluency, if mathematics is Higher LevelThis is the one case of pre-work that survives the objection to getting ahead, because it is reactivation of prior mastery rather than pre-teaching. Higher Level is 240 teaching hours and cumulative; the failure mode in DP2 is almost never “has not met the topic”, it is “algebra is slow, so the topic cannot land”.
Keep one language moving, in short spaced sessionsThe spacing research maps onto vocabulary almost verbatim. Across more than 1,350 participants with study gaps of up to three and a half months, the optimal gap fell to roughly 5 to 10 per cent of the test delay for a test a year away. For a student sitting exams about ten months later, that is a retrieval session every two to five weeks — not daily, and not never. Fifteen minutes at a time.

Not worth doing

And five things the evidence does not support

These are the standard recommendations. We checked them.

“Pre-learn the DP2 syllabus so you start ahead.”
The closest evidence available is summer bridge programmes, which front-load content before a course begins. An impact study of eight such programmes found positive effects on course completion in the following year and a half — effects that were no longer statistically significant at two years, with no impact on persistence or credits earned. Front-loading buys a head start that washes out.
“Your child will lose two to three months of learning over the summer.”
That figure comes from a 1996 meta-analysis whose headline findings have failed to replicate. More recent work found losses of about two weeks over the first summer and a small gain in mathematics over the second, and a large longitudinal analysis found average reading loss falling from about 6.6 points in Grade 1 to 0.9 by Grade 7. The whole literature stops at Grade 8. Anyone applying it to a seventeen-year-old is extrapolating from seven-year-olds, and the trend line is heading toward zero as students get older.
“Read the textbook cover to cover.”
Rereading is rated low-utility in the standard review of ten study techniques, alongside highlighting and summarising. Practice testing and distributed practice are rated high. If a book is going to be opened, it should be closed again and the content recalled.
“Catch up on your CAS hours.”
There is no hours requirement. The 150-hour figure was removed before the 2017 examinations, and what CAS actually asks for is evidence against seven learning outcomes and a project spanning at least a month. We would verify this against the current CAS guide with your coordinator before acting on it — but if it holds, nobody needs to grind out hours this summer.
“Do a pre-IB summer course.”
The category rests on the same front-loading logic as the bridge programmes above. We sell tutoring and we are still telling you this: a course that pre-teaches content is the weakest thing you can buy for this summer. Support aimed at decisions — the Extended Essay question, the Internal Assessment topic, the Higher Level combination — is defensible. Support aimed at getting ahead is not.

Sources: the Texas developmental summer bridge impact study; von Hippel’s replication analysis in Education Next (2019); Atteberry & McEachin; Kuhfeld & Morton at NWEA; Dunlosky et al. (2013); Cepeda et al., Psychological Science (2008).

The Swiss payoff

The three points that decide a Swiss offer are the three that do not count

This is the part of the topic no competing article touches, and it materially changes how a Swiss family should allocate effort.

WhereWhat is requiredThe trap
Swiss universities generallyAt least 32 of 42 points, excluding bonus points, across six subject categories, with at least three at Higher Level — one of which must be mathematics or a natural scienceThe Extended Essay and TOK bonus points do not count toward the threshold. They matter for the Diploma and for UK and US offers, and they cannot rescue a Swiss application
ETH Zurich38 of 42 excluding bonus points. Higher Level mathematics, one of physics, chemistry or biology, and one Language AMeeting it means direct admission with no entrance examination. Missing it means the Reduced Entrance Examination
EPFL38 of 42 excluding bonus points, with mathematics and physics at Higher LevelFirst-year places have been capped at 3,000 since 2025
University of ZurichGerman at C1 for foreign-language applicants, evidenced before matriculationC1 is a two-to-four-year project. For an English-medium student in Zurich this is a far bigger obstacle than any subject choice, and the summer before DP2 is late to start
Swiss medicineThe aptitude test is sat on the Friday of calendar week 27, with registration from April and closing at latest 45 days before; the fee is CHF 300An IB holder registers as holding a foreign diploma regardless of where the school is. Places are restricted

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swissuniversities’ published admission conditions for the International Baccalaureate, ETH Zurich’s admission requirements, and the University of Zurich’s Bachelor admission page. Verify the medicine test date against swissuniversities’ own publication rather than deriving it from the week number.

Two things follow, and they are worth more than any amount of pre-reading. First, the Higher Level combination is fixed at course selection, not at results: a student who chooses three Higher Level subjects with no mathematics and no natural science among them cannot meet the general Swiss requirement whatever score they earn. For a pre-DP1 student that is the single most consequential decision of the summer. Second, if the destination is a German- or French-language Swiss university, the language plan has to start now, because C1 does not happen in six months.

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What families actually say

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We have been extremely pleased with Good Tutors Finder. Our daughter’s tutor understands the IB Maths syllabus very well and quickly identified the areas where she needed more support. The lessons are focused, well prepared and include plenty of exam-style practice. Her confidence has improved enormously.

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Our daughter needed help strengthening her IB English essays and preparing for assessments. Her tutor gives thoughtful, detailed feedback and has helped her become much more confident with literary analysis and essay structure. The quality of the tuition has been excellent.

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Good Tutors Finder found us an excellent tutor for our son’s Gymi preparation. She is patient, extremely well organised and knows exactly what the entrance examination requires. He is far calmer about the whole thing than he was in the autumn.

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Questions

Common questions about IB summer preparation

How much should my child study over the summer before the IB?

Far less than most guides suggest. Take two to three weeks completely off, then a few hours a month on the four things that actually compound: the Extended Essay question, the Internal Assessment topics, mathematical fluency if mathematics is a Higher Level subject, and short spaced sessions on one language. The spacing research points to retrieval every two to five weeks for an exam roughly ten months away — that is a genuinely small commitment, and it is the version the evidence supports.

Should my child start the Extended Essay over the summer?

The question, yes. The essay, no. Six of the thirty marks under the new guide reward the research question, method and structure, and that is exactly what benefits from unhurried thinking. Aim for a draft question, six to ten sources genuinely read, and an outline. A rushed four thousand words written from sources that were skimmed is actively worse under the new Reflection criterion, which assesses how the student developed rather than how early they started.

When is the Extended Essay actually due?

The IB sets a submission date and communicates it to schools, and it strongly recommends that schools set their own internal deadlines for each stage. In practice almost every deadline a student hears about is the school’s, set months earlier to leave marking time. Ask your Diploma Programme Coordinator for the school’s published calendar — we could not find one Swiss school publishing it openly, so it is a request rather than a search.

Does the summer slide apply to IB students?

There is no evidence base for it in this age group. The whole summer-learning-loss literature stops at Grade 8, several of its classic findings failed to replicate, and average reading loss falls to near zero by Grade 7 in the data that does exist. Any article telling a Swiss parent their seventeen-year-old will lose two to three months of learning is applying findings from primary-school children. We would treat the risk as small and the value of rest as real.

How many CAS hours does my child need?

None, as far as we can establish. The 150-hour requirement was removed before the 2017 examinations, and what CAS asks for now is evidence against seven learning outcomes plus a project spanning at least a month. We flag this as worth confirming with your coordinator against the current CAS guide, because most articles on this subject still quote the old number — but if it holds, nobody needs to spend this summer accumulating hours.

What IB score do Swiss universities require?

At least 32 of 42 for admission generally, and 38 of 42 at ETH Zurich and EPFL — and in every case the threshold is on the subject points excluding the three bonus points from the Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge. There is also a shape requirement: six subject categories, at least three at Higher Level, one of which must be mathematics or a natural science. The shape is decided at course selection, and no score can fix it afterwards.

Is a summer tutor worth it before the IB?

Sometimes, and we would rather be specific than encouraging. It is worth it for three things: rebuilding algebraic fluency before a Higher Level year, moving a language toward the level a Swiss university will require, and getting an Extended Essay question to land when it has been circling for weeks. It is not worth it for pre-teaching the syllabus, which the evidence on front-loading does not support. If you tell us which of those you are looking at — or that you are not sure — we will say honestly whether a block is the right purchase. Book a tutor, or message us on WhatsApp first. There is no charge to ask, and none to be assigned one.

Where to go next

The rest of the IB estate

The pages behind the subjects, the comparison and the summer itself.

The Diploma, in detail

What is examined, and how each part is assessed.

IB tutors in SwitzerlandMYP tutorsIB vs IGCSE vs A-Level

The subjects that decide the total

Mathematics and the sciences, overwhelmingly.

Maths tutorsPhysics tutorsChemistry tutors

The summer itself

Cantonal holiday dates, entry deadlines and what a summer block costs.

Summer tutoring in SwitzerlandExam preparationSee all package prices

Start here

Tell us which summer this is, and what the school has asked for

Whether your child is going into DP1 or DP2, which six subjects they are taking and at what level, and what the school’s Extended Essay and Internal Assessment calendar says. That is usually enough to tell you whether this summer needs a tutor at all — and quite often the answer is no, in which case we will say so and tell you what the autumn should look like instead. Where a block is right, we come back with someone who has taught that syllabus, typically within 48 to 72 hours. No enrolment fee, and no fee to enquire or to be assigned.

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