D2 went to a private school from K-10 in the NE and went to an international school from 10-12 where she took the IB. She was a great writer and was accustom to write essays/papers almost every week at her US school. She thought IB writing requirements were very rigid. She literally said no good writer writes like that. She didn’t think the IB curriculum was harder, just more volume without a lot of creativity. She thought her private school honors were harder and interesting. I understand IB can be taught differently by different teacher or school, but at the end of day there are uniformed requirements. At many public schools in the US, due to over taxing of our teachers’ time, students are not given too many writing requirements, and when they are given teachers often do not give feedback until months later. IB is a good curriculum to force students write research papers and teach students to handle large volume of work. Both of kids could write a 5 page paper in matter of hours, whereas their friends who didn’t have as much practice while in high school would take days if not weeks.
D1 went to the same private school as D2. In her senior year, she took many AP exams without taking the AP course and she received most 5s and few 4s.
My recommendation to students in general is if you go to a highly competitive school (public or private) there is no need to take IB, but if your school is average or below then the IB curriculum would be a good option to ensure the quality of education.