My STEM kid did not even consider IB. He needed far more math and CS than was available, and went to a specialized STEM program. S1 would have been miserable trying to get through five years of foreign language. STEM program worked well for him. Got the depth he needed, then went to a school with Core specifically so he could get a liberal arts education as well.
S2, a history guy, got into the STEM, IB, and humanities competitive admit programs. He took AP and IB exams to ensure he’d get credit for the coursework he did, but did not study for each separately. The IB teachers tended to cover the AP objectives in the IB course, so he didn’t have to do extra exam prep. (Not that he did. By May he was too fried to care, for the most part.)
He had great HS preparation, but he got to college severely burned out and never really recovered from that. He has ADD and NVLD issues which the HS would never accommodate, so we had a lot of scaffolding and structure at home for him to get his work done. He got to college and managing his life plus classes was a major challenge. It wasn’t that the work was that difficult – it was trying to tackle the organization. Did not help his cause by refusing to get help from campus resources. Took a semester off to regroup and still struggled afterwards.
He loved IB and got a great education, but if I had to advise him on making the decision again, it would have been a different one. He gave a lot of thought to his choices, and I know he picked the one that he liked best (and we thought it was a great fit, too), but the workload was daunting and the lack of institutional support very surprising compared to the STEM program.
How much is there a self-selection bias in the results? IB programs are notoriously rigorous and tough. One could imagine that IB participants already exhibited higher levels of aptitude and achievement. Not surprisingly, their subsequent college performance is elevated. A private high school here in SF will be adding IB this fall, and I know two kids who are planning to enroll in the program. Both are already stellar students, which makes me wonder if “willingness to do IB” is the key factor, not the program itself.
My wife went to a true IB boarding school in Europe. At the time it was free for everyone. From the way she has described it, the level and layering of knowledge was far more in depth than in AP courses. The problem is that when IB is done well, it is better. But there just aren’t enough good teachers. Problem two is idiot educators and social reformers like Jay Matthews, who think you can put mediocre students in an IB class and make them brilliant. All you do is ruin the class.
@soccerguy315 I do believe you are correct that the IB exam score was just a part of the course grade. Not only that, but the students were not given their scores on the IB exams, and the teachers were not supposed to tell them. My wife said they would say they did “very well,” “very well indeed,” “remarkably well,” and so forth. It was a code they all knew and agreed upon.
@EarlVanDorn Considering the IB exams are externally marked - an exam taken in New York may be marked by a reader in Little Rock, Leeds, Hong Kong, or any other place you’d care to name - I don’t understand how these teachers could have known a student’s grade.
Are you referring to grades for a student’s internal assessment (or the language course equivalents)?
In IB programs in the US, students are typically given regular grades by the school, like any other high school grades, in addition to scores generated by the international IB program.
My kids attended an IB program (the same one as CountingDown’s son, I believe), and it was a good fit for them. It was a lot of work, but they did feel that it prepared them well for college, especially with respect to writing papers. I do not think it would have been a good fit for an advanced STEM-focused kid–both of my kids were more interested in the humanities.
But what really matters is how well the program is delivered in your local school. This is true for both IB and AP.
@NotVerySmart My wife attended Atlantic College in Wales, a two-year IB boarding school for kids all over the world (the king of the Netherlands went there, but before my wife’s time). As I recall, they took the tests with some time left in their last term, and the grades on their tests were returned to their teachers to used in computing their final grade. The teachers weren’t supposed to give them their numerical grade, but they essentially did in code.
@EarlVanDorn At present, I gather exam results are released in July, and the candidates are the first to know their marks. Maybe this was different in your wife’s day, or maybe her school had an unusually late end of term.
I could be completely wrong, but this is how my teachers describe the process.
My S did attend the same IB as Hunt’s. S2 felt he was really well prepared for college, and as I mentioned, he says he’d still do it again. My regret is that he needed to accomplish those things with less structural assistance from us. We had tried to get accommodations from the school, but no dice. The administration was not inclined to give accommodations to kids who qualified for a program that took only about 15% of the applicants. This was a big problem when he got to college – he believed he didn’t deserve accommodations, and so never learned how to create his own. YMMV – the IB education was excellent.
Some schools allow you to skip an entire year of college if you graduate high school with the IB diploma. I’d say that says more about the college than about the IB program though. Any school that considers a senior year of high school to be the equivalent of their first year of college does not expect much from its first year students. And if you review the schools that give a year of credit for an IB program I bet you’d find that many have difficulty filling their seats or their claim to fame is efficiency rather than academic excellence (or they require a 6 or 7 on exams-which is earned by only about 30%, depending upon topic. About 60% of the exams have grades of 5,6,or 7; A '5" is a very low standard for considering a high school class to be the equivalent of a college class).