IB May Session Exam Preparation in the UAE

The May session is the IB's main examination series, and it is the one almost every UAE Diploma cohort sits, because the local academic year ends in June or July. That timing puts the written papers in the final term rather than the middle of one, which is convenient for the school and brutal for revision, since the same weeks carry mandatory lessons, end-of-year school business and, in most years, Ramadan. A session is not only the papers. It includes internally assessed components submitted and uploaded by the school weeks or months earlier, the core components, and the entry itself, which is filed by the school's Diploma coordinator rather than by the family.

That last point is where families lose control without realising it. Nobody at home submits an entry, changes a level from Higher to Standard or registers a subject. The coordinator does, within windows the IB sets, and once a level change window has closed it has closed. The single most valuable email a parent can send in the autumn term is a short one asking the coordinator to confirm, in writing, the school's internal deadlines for every internally assessed component, the date by which a level change must be requested, and the school's own mock window. Those three facts turn a vague plan into a dated one.

A smaller group sits the November session instead, usually retake candidates or students at schools on a different year pattern. Retaking is a real route rather than a failure, but it is a separate registration with its own deadline, and the decision is better made with the coordinator in the days after results than left for a month. This page does not publish IB session or results dates. The IB sets them, they can be revised, and the only sources worth trusting are your coordinator or ibo.org.

Five bodies regulate private schools across the seven emirates. The Knowledge and Human Development Authority is responsible for enhancing and overseeing the quality of private education in Dubai. The Department of Education and Knowledge supervises the licensing and accreditation of private schools in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain. The Sharjah Private Education Authority regulates private education in Sharjah, the Department of Knowledge does so in Ras Al Khaimah, and the Ministry of Education plays a supervisory role in Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah. Sharjah's and Ras Al Khaimah's authorities also approve tuition fees, curricula, programmes, courses, activities and assessment methods, so curriculum approval and not only inspection sits at emirate level there.

What none of them does is run the assessment. The IB sets the submission windows, writes the papers, marks the externally assessed components, moderates the internal ones and publishes the results. An emirate authority can license a school, inspect it, approve its fee and require subjects alongside the licensed curriculum. It cannot move a deadline your child has missed, re-mark a paper or tell you what a grade boundary will be. Treating the regulator as the escalation route for an assessment problem wastes the two weeks in which something could still have been done inside the school.

Where the regulator does matter for exam preparation is in everything surrounding the papers: the term calendar, the mandatory lessons that keep running, the staff conduct rules that decide who may coach your child privately, and the inspection report that tells you something about the school without telling you anything about your candidate. Read the report for what it is, a school-level judgement published in a particular year, and then ask subject-level questions of the department. The table below separates the two jurisdictions so nothing is escalated to the wrong desk.

Arabic, Islamic Education and Social or Moral studies are mandatory in Dubai private schools regardless of the licensed international curriculum, and KHDA's requirements had to be implemented by the start of the 2025-26 academic year, or April 2026 for schools whose year begins in April. For a Diploma family that is not a footnote. These lessons continue through the exam term, they sit inside the school day, and they are the reason the revision week a parent imagines is shorter than the one the timetable actually allows.

The arithmetic is worth doing once. KHDA calculates mandatory-subject instructional time on a 40-minute lesson unit, allows schools to vary lesson length provided the total weekly time is met, and advises that any mandatory subject lesson runs at least 25 minutes. Multiply the units your child's school timetables across Arabic, Islamic Education and Social Studies and you have the block of school time that is not available for Higher Level revision, whatever the exam calendar says. Families who plan around that number stop treating the school day as flexible and start protecting evening and weekend hours deliberately.

There are rules about how those classes run, and they matter if you are thinking about outside support. Schools must organise separate classes for Arabs and non-Arabs in Arabic as a first language, Islamic Education and Social Studies, and combined classes for both groups are strictly prohibited because the curriculum expectations and language of instruction differ. Standard Arabic is the main language of instruction for Islamic Education for Arabs and for Arabic as a first language, and the school's licensed-curriculum language applies for non-Arabs in Islamic Education and Moral, Social and Cultural studies. For the mandatory subjects, the use of any different or additional content without prior permission from the Ministry of Education is strictly prohibited — so outside support here means working with the school's own material, never substituting a tutor's.

Plenty of UAE families have a Diploma candidate and an IGCSE candidate in the same spring. The two boards do not share a calendar, a zone system or an entry process, and assuming they do is how a deadline gets missed. Cambridge International runs IGCSE, O Level and International A Level exams in a June series and a November series, with Primary and Lower Secondary Checkpoint tests in March, May and October. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE exams are available in May/June and November each year. The IB's own session dates must come from your coordinator or ibo.org.

Cambridge shows exactly how far ahead an entry sits, provided you read the series your child can actually take. In the UAE that is June or November. The February and March sitting belongs to India, and the March, May and October Checkpoint dates belong to Primary and Lower Secondary year groups rather than to IGCSE, so both are dead ends on a UAE calendar. For the June and November series Cambridge publishes the entry and forecast-grade dates series by series, and both of them land months before the first paper, with the centre's own internal cut-off earlier again. Cambridge also allocates every centre to one of six administrative zones, states that it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, and says it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after the wrong zone timetable was used.

Pearson's published dates make the same point from the other direction. The November 2026 final International GCSE timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026; June 2026 results went to centres on 19 August 2026 and to students on 20 August 2026; November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. Pearson publishes provisional timetables ahead of each series, and the November ones appear long before that cohort has even started the course, which is why any date on a tutoring page should be read as indicative and checked against the board's live timetable. For a two-candidate household the practical move is a single shared calendar with one row per board and a named person responsible for each entry.

Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated by permit. The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation private tutor work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 regarding the introduction of private tuition work permits. The permit is granted free of charge for two years, and eligible applicants include teachers registered in government or private schools, employees in the government and private sectors, unemployed individuals, school students aged 15 to 18, and university students. MoHRE's own service page is titled Issuance of a New Work Permit — Private Tutor Licensing, lists no fees and a two-working-day completion time, and is applied for through the MoHRE smart app, website and e-services system.

Individuals offering private tutoring without a permit from MoHRE are subject to fines and penalties outlined in the applicable laws. No fine schedule is published, so no figure appears on this page; a number circulating online could not be verified against any official source. The honest position is that the permit is required and operating without one carries consequences the Ministry has not itemised publicly.

The rule that catches families in the final term is a different one. ADEK's professional-ethics rules for private and charter school staff prohibit teachers from providing paid private tutoring to students enrolled at their own school, and teachers tutoring outside school hours must hold the MoHRE permit, whose code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with their own school. This is press-reported and worth verifying against the current ADEK policy document, but the direction is clear: the obvious shortcut — paying your child's own subject teacher for exam coaching — is the one route to avoid. A tutoring operation with premises and staff in Dubai is a different legal animal again, needing a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute. IB Gram is a matching platform with no UAE premises, and makes no claim to hold that permit.

The weeks before the May session are when the pressure on academic honesty peaks, and they are also when the boundary is clearest. Assessed work must be the candidate's own. A tutor may teach the content, explain what a criterion is asking for, question a line of reasoning, point out that a conclusion is not supported by the data, and read a draft the student wrote and give feedback on it. A tutor may not author any part of it, supply text to be pasted in, edit a piece to completion, or hand over a worked version of an exploration for the student to copy.

This is not a house style. The IB's academic-honesty rules make outside authorship a malpractice matter for the student, with consequences that can reach the award of the Diploma itself, and the student's own supervisor and coordinator sign authenticity declarations at submission. A family paying for support in the final term should understand that the declaration is made about work the student produced, and that any help which cannot survive the coordinator asking about it is help that should not have been given. Keeping session notes and dated drafts protects the candidate, not the tutor.

There is a commercial dimension too. One provider ranking for these searches sells finished internal assessments outright, at a published price. That is an integrity breach, an expulsion risk for the student and a liability for the family that pays for it. The useful test before buying anything in the final term is simple: ask what the student will have done by the end of the engagement. If the answer is that work will be handed over rather than produced, the engagement is not tutoring. IB Gram's position is the narrow one — teaching, questioning and feedback on the student's own work, and nothing beyond it.

By the time a UAE candidate walks into the first paper, a meaningful share of the Diploma score is already decided. Internally assessed components have been submitted, marked by the school and sent for moderation. The Extended Essay and the Theory of Knowledge essay are gone. Creativity, Activity, Service is complete or it is not. Those marks can still move slightly through moderation, but no amount of revision in April changes what was uploaded in February. Knowing which parts are banked tells you where the remaining hours should go, and it stops a family spending the final term on work that cannot be improved.

What is still movable is everything the external papers carry, and in most subjects that is the larger share of the grade. The highest-return work in the last weeks is almost never new content. It is the mark-scheme behaviours: reading the command term before answering, allocating time by marks rather than by how interesting a question looks, showing the step that earns the method mark, labelling a diagram so the written answer can refer to it, and finishing the paper. Candidates routinely lose more marks to unfinished papers and mis-read commands than to topics they never understood.

The core deserves a specific mention because of how it fails. Theory of Knowledge and the Extended Essay are graded A to E, and a grade E in either is a failing condition for the Diploma regardless of subject scores. That makes a handful of hours spent on a core component, early enough to matter, one of the highest-leverage decisions available — and it is the opposite of where most final-term money goes. If a family can fund only a small amount of support, the question is not which Higher Level subject is weakest. It is whether anything in the core is at risk.

Three of six competitor pages researched for this project publish no price at all, and the two that do quote US dollars, which UAE families do not transact in. The figures below are market rates in AED read from providers' own published pages and from a Dubai tutoring cost table in October 2026. They are not an IB Gram price list. Our model is a trial lesson at no charge first, then a quote for the specific subject, level and number of hours, so you see the total before anything is committed.

Read the bands as a map of the market rather than a menu. Budget online tutoring starts low because the tutor is often a university student rather than a subject specialist; EdFlik publishes rates from AED 45 to 65 an hour and Tutopiya from AED 33 to 52. Qualified subject tutors online sit higher, with Unitors publishing IGCSE from AED 150 and IB from AED 200. A tutor travelling to an address costs more again, because travel is inside the rate: Bestimate's Dubai table puts in-home visits at AED 180 to 350, and home tutors at AED 200 to 500. Specialist IB, IGCSE and A-Level rates run AED 200 to 450 and above; TutorChase publishes AED 270 and BartyED AED 650 for premium named tutors.

The number that decides the bill is not the hourly rate, it is hours times weeks. A single Higher Level subject at one hour a week for a twelve-week final block is twelve hours; at the specialist mid-band that is a four-figure sum in AED, and three subjects is three times it. Monthly packages seen in the market run from AED 799 a month for eight online sessions to AED 1,599 to 1,799 a month for four two-hour visits. Ask any provider three questions before paying: is the rate per 60 minutes or per lesson, what the quoted figure says about VAT, and what happens to unused hours. For context on the wider household budget, KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that private school fees in Dubai would not increase for 2026-27 under the emirate's second economic incentives package.

Parents search for a tutor who will come to the house, and the question deserves a straight answer rather than a redirect. A tutor travelling to a UAE address is a real market: Bestimate's Dubai figures put it at AED 180 to 350 an hour and independent home tutors at AED 200 to 500, with travel priced into the rate. It works best for younger children, for families who want a visible adult presence during the session, and in dense school catchments where a tutor can reach several households in an evening. Those are genuine advantages and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

IB Gram does not operate that way in the Emirates. Home visits are arranged only in India; in the UAE every lesson is one-to-one over live video, scheduled in Gulf Standard Time. The reason is the one that matters most to a Higher Level candidate weeks from papers: the choice of tutor stops being limited by driving distance. A family in Fujairah or Al Ain gets a Chemistry Higher Level specialist on the same terms as a family in Emirates Hills, instead of whoever happens to be within a twenty-minute drive. For a narrow Diploma subject in a market where the IB accounts for 7% of Dubai private-school enrolment, that difference decides whether a specialist is available at all.

The second reason is time. A 4pm slot with travel built in consumes an evening at both ends; a 6pm video slot consumes an hour. In the final term, when a candidate needs a short session the night before a paper or an unplanned hour after a disappointing mock, the format that can be moved is worth more than the format that feels more formal. Screen sharing also means past-paper work is annotated live and kept, so the student has the marked attempt afterwards rather than a memory of it.

Families often ask what they should be filing for a UAE university while revision is under way, and the answer is usually nothing. Ministry of Education equivalency works on issued certificates, so the file is assembled after results, not during preparation. What can be done in advance is knowing what the Ministry counts and which documents the school issues on request, so the post-results weeks are administration rather than discovery. IB Gram describes the process and points to the official channel; it does not perform, submit or guarantee equivalency, and nobody should be charged for implying otherwise.

The sourced requirements are the British and American tracks. For the British curriculum, students must submit proof of one accredited subject at the Advanced Level with a grade of no less than E, or two accredited subjects at the Advanced Subsidiary Level with the same grade, and must pass five accredited subjects in GCSE or IGCSE certificates with a grade of no less than E or grade 3. Arabic and Islamic education are not included among those five required subjects. That five-subject rule is worth stating precisely, because a competitor page ranking for UAE searches tells parents six IGCSE subjects are required. For the American track, English proficiency requires a score of 5 in the IELTS academic test, 61 in the TOEFL iBT, or 450 in the reading and writing section of the SAT, and mathematics requires at least 450 in the SAT Math test before applying.

No IB points threshold appears on this page. The reporting that sources the British and American figures states no IB equivalency score, so publishing one would mean inventing it. If your child is applying to a UAE institution with an IB Diploma, verify the requirement on moe.gov.ae or with the attestation authority in your emirate, and ask the university's admissions office directly in the same week. Tutoring is not a requirement for equivalency, for attestation or for admission, and any provider implying that it is has invented an urgency that the regulatory process does not contain.