A student asked me this week whether I could share any predictions for the upcoming papers. Specifically: what topics haven’t come up much yet in the new syllabus?
It’s a smart question. And I thought, well, I have the papers. Let me actually look.
So I went through every May 2025 and November 2025 IB Physics HL Paper 2. All five of them. I mapped every question against the syllabus and looked for the gaps.
Here’s what I found.
This is not a guarantee. The IB can test anything. But after two full exam sessions, some topics have barely appeared in Paper 2, and that’s worth knowing.
First, a quick note on what this analysis covers
This is Paper 2 only. Paper 1A (multiple choice) and Paper 1B (data-based) will have covered additional content I can’t account for here. The gaps below are specifically Paper 2 gaps.
I’m also only working with the papers I have access to: three May 2025 time zones and two November 2025 time zones. The picture would be even sharper with a full dataset, but this is enough to draw some clear conclusions.
What has been tested thoroughly
Before I get to the gaps, it’s worth knowing what came up repeatedly across both sessions, so you can see where the IB clearly loves to go.
Theme A got a lot of attention. Forces, momentum, impulse, buoyancy and viscous drag (Stokes’ law), power, and the A.5 spacetime diagrams all appeared multiple times. A.4 rotational mechanics showed up properly in November, including moment of inertia, angular momentum and the Atwood machine with a rotating pulley.
Theme B was well represented. Thermal conduction, the greenhouse effect with energy balance calculations, ideal gas law, and entropy and thermodynamic cycles (B.4) all featured. B.5 circuits appeared in November, with the classic EMF and internal resistance graph question.
Theme C was covered across both sessions. SHM energy questions, wave interference and path difference, diffraction gratings, total internal reflection, standing waves in pipes and strings (November had a great Kundt’s tube question), and the Doppler effect all appeared.
Themes D and E both featured heavily. Gravitational potential and orbital mechanics, electric fields and motion of charged particles, electromagnetic induction and Lenz’s law, radioactive decay calculations, Compton scattering, the photoelectric effect, nuclear energy levels, and stellar physics (HR diagrams, Wien’s law, parallax, luminosity) all came up.
In short: the IB has been thorough. Most of the syllabus has had at least some Paper 2 coverage.
The gaps worth paying attention to
E.4 Fission
This is the biggest one.
Not a single question on nuclear fission has appeared in any of the five Paper 2s I analysed. Not one.
This is a full SL and HL topic. The IB expects you to understand how energy is released in both spontaneous and neutron-induced fission, how chain reactions work, and the role of each component in a nuclear power station: control rods, moderators, heat exchangers, and shielding. You also need to be able to do energy release calculations using mass-energy equivalence.
It’s a concrete, calculation-friendly topic. The kind the IB usually loves in Paper 2. And it simply hasn’t appeared yet under the new syllabus.
I’d make sure you know it properly.
D.2 HL: Electric potential
The SL content of D.2 has appeared in almost every paper. Coulomb’s law, electric field strength, field lines, parallel plates, motion of charged particles through electric fields. The IB loves all of this.
But the HL-only extension has been very quiet.
I’m talking about electric potential (Ve = kQ/r), the relationship between electric field and potential gradient, work done in moving a charge (W = qΔVe), and equipotential surfaces. There are 6 hours of HL-only content here that hasn’t been directly tested in Paper 2 across either session.
If you’re sitting HL, this is the area I’d give some focused attention to in the final stretch.
B.2 Greenhouse Effect: the mechanism
The greenhouse effect appeared in May 2025, but the question focused on energy balance calculations: albedo, emissivity, the solar constant, intensity absorbed by the surface.
What hasn’t come up is the explanation of how it actually works at a molecular level. The IB syllabus asks you to explain absorption of infrared radiation in terms of molecular energy levels, and to describe both the resonance model and the molecular energy level model. That side of B.2 hasn’t been the focus of a Paper 2 question yet.
It’s a common “explain” or “outline” style question. Worth being comfortable with.
What this means for your revision
If you’re in the final days before your exams, I’m not telling you to abandon everything and only study these three areas. That’s not how this works.
What I am saying is this: if you’re looking for where to direct any remaining focused effort, these are the topics where Paper 2 has been quietest. E.4 Fission in particular stands out because it’s a complete absence, it’s a concrete topic, and it’s testable with calculations.
Know your fission. Know your electric potential. And make sure you can explain the greenhouse effect at a molecular level, not just calculate the numbers.
The rest of your revision should continue as planned: past papers, mark schemes, and making sure you’re confident with the topics that do come up every time (orbital mechanics, induction, SHM, radioactive decay, stellar physics). Those aren’t going anywhere.
You don’t need to predict the exam perfectly to do well. You need to be prepared broadly, sharp on exam technique, and confident under pressure.
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Sally Weatherly is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, author of 4 IB Physics books, and has been teaching IB Physics since 2004.