IB and IGCSE tutors for families along the Corniche

The direct answer first: in a typical Diploma Programme timetable a subject receives about four taught hours a week, and the assessed work a student must produce outside those hours includes an Internal Assessment worth a fifth to a quarter of the subject grade, a four-thousand-word Extended Essay, a Theory of Knowledge essay and exhibition, and enough timed paper practice to be fluent in three different paper formats.

No school can teach all of that inside contact time, and the better ones do not pretend to. What they do is set deadlines, provide a supervisor, and expect the student to manage the work. For a self-organised student that is fine. For most sixteen-year-olds it means the largest controllable block of marks in the Diploma gets produced in the last available fortnight.

At IGCSE the gap is narrower but sharper. Content coverage is usually complete. What is missing is the skill of writing a full paper in the time allowed and of answering the command term that was actually used. A student who writes everything they know in response to a question asking them to explain one factor has demonstrated knowledge and scored two marks out of six.

The table below splits the work into what class time reliably covers and what it does not. Use it to ask the school a specific question, which is more useful than asking whether your child needs a tutor. The honest answer to that second question is often no, as long as somebody is covering the right-hand column.

This is the most useful page of information a Diploma student can be given, and almost nobody gives it to them. Internally assessed work is marked against named criteria with published mark allocations. A student who knows that a sciences investigation carries twenty-four marks split evenly across research design, data analysis, conclusion and evaluation will spend their time differently from one who thinks the experiment is the point.

The pattern repeats with different shapes in different subjects. A Mathematics exploration is marked out of twenty, with six of those marks for the use of mathematics and only three each for personal engagement and reflection, which is why a beautifully written exploration with thin mathematics underperforms. A History Internal Assessment puts fifteen of its twenty-five marks in the investigation itself. The Extended Essay carries thirty-four marks, twelve of them for critical thinking alone.

Two practical consequences follow. First, read the criteria before choosing the question, because some questions cannot score well on the heaviest criterion no matter how carefully they are executed. Second, when a draft comes back with a mark, ask which criterion lost the marks rather than how to improve generally. Teachers answer the specific question readily and the general one vaguely, because the general one has no answer.

Confirm every figure below against the current subject guide through your school's IB coordinator. Subject guides are revised on a cycle, this page does not republish board documents, and a mark allocation that was right two years ago may not be right now.

Weightings decide where revision time should go, and students consistently guess them wrong. A Higher Level Mathematics candidate who spends equal time on all three papers has over-invested in two of them and under-invested in the one that supplies no method. A Standard Level English candidate who neglects the individual oral has neglected thirty per cent of the grade.

The structure also changes between levels in ways that surprise families. In Mathematics, moving from Standard to Higher Level does not just add content: Papers 1 and 2 fall from forty per cent each to thirty, and a new Paper 3 takes twenty. In History, the Higher Level Paper 3 regional option takes thirty-five per cent, which is the largest single component in the course and the one most often started late.

Internal Assessment weight is the other number worth knowing. In most Diploma sciences the investigation is twenty per cent of the final grade, and in History the Internal Assessment is a quarter at Standard Level. That is a fifth to a quarter of the result produced under no time pressure, with the criteria published in advance. Treating it as a side project is the most common avoidable loss in the whole programme.

Work from the table as a planning tool and confirm each figure against the current subject guide. The reason to have it in front of you is simple: a revision timetable built on weightings beats one built on how much a student enjoys each paper.

Most study plans fail because they assume a student has four clear evenings. In practice a Corniche household has a short commute, a flat with one quiet surface, siblings, and a Diploma student who is tired by 21:00. A plan that ignores that produces guilt rather than work.

The version that holds is built from short, named blocks with a deliverable at the end of each. Ninety minutes is the longest useful block for most sixteen-year-olds, and forty-five is enough to produce something. The deliverable matters more than the duration: a block that ends with three marked exam questions is work, while a block that ends with reading over notes is a feeling.

The weekend is where the heavy components fit. A full paper to time needs an unbroken two hours and a mood nobody has on a Tuesday, so Saturday morning is where it belongs. Internal Assessment work is the same: data analysis and drafting need continuity, and twenty-minute fragments across a week produce a document that reads as though it was written by five people.

One more constraint is specific to apartment living. A flat usually has one quiet working surface, and it is often the same table the family eats at, so a block has to start and finish rather than sprawl. Students who agree a start time with the household get more done than students who intend to work all evening.

The table is a template rather than a prescription. Change the days to fit the household. Keep two features: every block names a deliverable, and the heavy timed work sits at the weekend rather than at the end of a school day.

Past papers are the most powerful revision tool available and the most commonly wasted. The standard failure is to work through a paper with the mark scheme open, score most of it, feel reassured, and learn nothing. That is reading, not practice, and it predicts an exam result poorly.

The version that works has three rules. Sit the paper to time, in one sitting, with nothing open. Mark it yourself against the official scheme afterwards, writing the reason next to every lost mark rather than the correct answer. Then record the reason in a running list, because almost every student has three recurring errors and does not know what they are.

The reasons cluster predictably. Misreading the command term. Running out of time on the last long question. Omitting units. Answering a question about one factor by writing about three. None of those are knowledge problems, and all of them are fixable in a fortnight once they have been named. This is the whole content of what a good tutor does in a timed paper programme.

On sourcing, work from official material through the school. Syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes and grade-boundary tables belong to the boards that publish them, and the right approach is to use the official source and cite it rather than to circulate copies. IB Gram does not host or supply board documents as downloads, and a provider offering a library of them is a signal rather than a convenience.

The figures here are market rates in the UAE, taken from providers' own published pricing and from a published 2026 Dubai tutoring rate survey by Bestimate. They are the market, not an IB Gram price list. The reason to show them on a page about coverage gaps is that component work is finite: a Theory of Knowledge essay block is four sessions, not a year, and the cost should be judged that way.

The published hourly spread is wide enough to be worth reading carefully. At the budget online end the figures run roughly AED 45 to 65, with one platform entering at AED 33 to 52. An agency that publishes its rates lists AED 150 for IGCSE and AED 200 for IB; a UK-based agency quotes AED 270; survey data puts specialist exam-year work at AED 200 to 450 and above; and the premium named end reaches AED 650. In-home visits in the emirate are published between roughly AED 180 and AED 500, travel included inside the hour.

Converting those hourly figures into the monthly commitment a Corniche family actually signs is the more useful exercise. Eight online sessions appear at around AED 799 a month, against AED 1,599 to 1,799 for four two-hour in-home sessions. A weekly one-hour slot comes to roughly AED 240 to 600 a month at budget level, AED 600 to 1,200 mid-market, and AED 1,000 to 2,000 or beyond for specialist exam-year support.

The second column of the table is the one worth arguing about with a provider. A component block has a defensible length. If a quote for Theory of Knowledge support runs to twenty sessions, ask what happens in sessions nine to twenty, because the essay is one thousand six hundred words long.

Families searching for a home tutor along the Corniche have a reasonable case to consider. The district is central, the roads are short, and a tutor based on the island can reach most Corniche addresses quickly. Unlike the outer communities, travel time is not the main objection here.

The objection that does apply is matching. The work described on this page is component-shaped: Criterion D in a sciences investigation, Paper 3 in Analysis and Approaches, the structure of a Theory of Knowledge essay. Those are taught well by a relatively small number of people. Restricting the choice to those willing to visit a Corniche tower at 18:00 on a Wednesday narrows it for no academic reason.

IB Gram does not offer home visits in Abu Dhabi or anywhere else in the UAE, and does not run a centre in the emirate. Delivery is one-to-one over live video, with a shared screen for marking a paper line by line. For this kind of work the shared screen is a genuine advantage rather than a compromise, because both people annotate the same document and the student keeps the annotated copy.

There is also a continuity argument that matters in a district of rented apartments. Households here move between buildings and between emirates more often than villa families do, and an online tutor does not change when the address does. In the term before a terminal paper, that is worth more than any other form of stability.

The table sets out where each format wins. In-home provision has a real advantage for younger children who need an adult present to stay on task, and that is worth saying plainly on a page that recommends something else.

The pressure described on this page is exactly the pressure that produces academic misconduct, and it is worth naming directly. A student three weeks from an Internal Assessment deadline with no data is in the situation where an offer to supply a finished document becomes tempting. Providers in this market do sell that, and one researched competitor sells completed Internal Assessments outright.

The consequence falls on the student. Assessed coursework must be the student's own, and a malpractice finding can cost a diploma rather than a grade. No provider shares that risk, and none of them carries it after the fact. The boundary is therefore not a matter of taste.

What a tutor can do is substantial. Explain how each criterion is awarded and what the marks reward. Ask the questions a supervisor asks about scope, method and evidence. Read a draft the student has written and say precisely why a section will not score. Teach the referencing convention. None of that involves supplying text, data or analysis that enters a submission, and all of it moves marks.

There is a second practical protection, which is to involve the supervisor early. Schools deal with an honest problem, including an experiment that produced nothing usable, far better than they deal with a late one. A student who reports a failed method six weeks out gets help; a student who reports it the night before a deadline gets a deadline.

The real protection is the calendar. An Internal Assessment planned across three months is a manageable project with room for a failed experiment. The same work compressed into three weeks is the situation this section is about. Booking component support early is a cheaper form of integrity insurance than any policy.