Our zoned high school is an IB World School that only offers AP courses when they do not have an IB equivalent. ( Junior English is the one class that is IB but they will take the AP test.) What are the pros & cons to to taking IB courses instead of AP classes?
IB courses are usually said to be very high workload, even though colleges usually do not consider the HL courses to be significantly more advanced than AP courses in the same subjects (based on their AP and IB credit and placement pages). Note that IB SL courses are not generally considered advanced enough to give advanced placement in college (although some IB high schools “top up” some of them – e.g. adding additional calculus to IB SL math to allow students to also take the AP calculus AB test).
Will the student be doing the IB diploma (with its relatively rigid limitations on scheduling and course selection) or will s/he be selecting IB HL and AP courses in subjects of strength and interest the way that students ordinarily would select AP courses at non-IB high schools that offer AP courses?
Remember that a student can take an AP test without taking the AP course. But a student cannot take an IB test without taking the IB course.
It is very common for students who take IB courses to take the AP test in that subject in addition to the IB test because it is easier to get college credit and advanced placement with the AP test. Whether or not this effort will be successful depends on (1) how close the IB curriculum in the particular subject is to the AP curriculum, and (2) whether the school has tweaked the IB course so that it also provides good preparation for the AP test.
IB:
Pro: Its rigor and homework requirements results in disciplined students capable of dealing with a lot of work, though much of it is often characterized as busy work. Considered excellent college preparation.
Con: Plenty kids get into elite schools without ever setting a foot in an IB program.
My daughter has been in IB for three weeks now so I’ll have to get back to you later for a definitive answer. However, here are some of her comments so far:
“For the first time in high school I am taking a test where I have to to be able to PROVE the answer and explain how I know it to be true…my tests are all short answer or essay vs. just recognizing the answer on a multiple choice test.”
- LESS busy work. At least 3 of her teachers have told them they get no grades for the homework i.e. very similar to college classes. Homework exists for them to learn the material and it is totally optional and dependent on how much they want to learn.
-Active, engaged discussion in the classroom.
-Smaller classes and kids who want to be there vs. pre-AP and AP classes full of kids whose parents are really pushing those classes.
So far it has been a great thing for my kid who really truly loves to learn and was tired of the endless busy work of AP classes. I totally know we could be singing a different song in a few months so I’ll be sure and update.
I meant to add a comparison. Her friends in AP English had to read an assigned book over the summer and answer about 20 questions about the book. For my daughters IB English (HL) they had to pick a world current even topic; analyze about 10 sources; write a paper and have a Powerpoint presentation for the first day of school.
So they had a lot of work to do, but it was for a subject that interested them and something they were passionate about.
@carachel2, what you describe seems very positive.
But some of what you describe is specific to your school. It may not be applicable to other IB programs.
For example, the concept of ungraded homework doesn’t apply to IB in general. Neither does the idea that the kids who are there want to be there. Both of these things vary from one IB school to another.
@Marian …oh I agree! I don’t have anything to compare it to so I’m just going by what I’ve seen so far. She has previously been very frustrated in AP and pre-AP classes because of the high volume of busywork and so far she has not expressed that at all.
My son recieved an IB diploma last year. In his program, the biggest benefits were 1)thematic curriculum, 2)going through the two years of IB courses (and pretty much the 2 years of “pre IB” courses) with the same kids, 3)increased rigor over the AP curriculum, 4)the IA’s (individual assessments) and IB essay provided an opportunity to do much more in depth research/work than in a normal HS curriculum.
Downsides were 1)regimented curriculum, 2)the SL tests are worthless, 3)it is much harder to get a 7 on the IB HL test than a 5 on the AP test, even though a lot of colleges consider them equivalent for purposes of credit. Point 2 is muted somewhat because several guys in his class chasing credits took the AP test in their SL subjects. Most did pretty well (4-5) if I remember.
A point about rigor. At least in my son’s program IB is a pretty significant step above AP. As I understand it, that is the way it is supposed to work. For example, a number of kids in my son’s HL chem and math classes took the AP test after their junior year (year one of the IB curriculum) at the teachers’ recommendation. All of the guys taking the AP calc test scored a five, and I think all but one got a 5 on the AP chem test. My son didn’t study for either AP test, even after I told him he was going to pay me back the cost of the test if he didn’t at least get a 4. He got 5s in both. On the other hand, he studied hard (for him) for the IB tests the next year. He got a 6 in chem and I think a 4 in math.
Another thing to think about:
US IB students have to complete all the state- or local-mandated graduation requirements, and US IB students who apply to US colleges have to meet the same requirements for admission that everyone else does (SAT or ACT, Subject Tests in some cases, ECs, essays, recommendations, interviews in some cases).
This means that US IB students cannot focus entirely on the IB program. They also have to give some attention to these other things, and not just during the pre-IB (9th and 10th grade) years.
IB students in most other countries can focus exclusively on IB for two years, and I think this is closer to what the people who designed the IB program intended.
This has a lot of consequences. For example, at the IB program my daughter attended, everyone had to take HL English and HL History as two of their IB subjects because these courses also fulfilled state graduation requirements (the SL equivalents would not have, and IB social studies courses other than HL history would not have). So the flexibility that these students had in choosing which subjects to study HL and which subjects to study SL was limited.
My 16 yo daughter is taking a blend of AP and IB classes this year (junior). She says her IB Bio HL is by far the most intense class she’s ever taken in terms of requiring a lot of high level thinking and work. Many of her peers doing the full IB diploma track are slammed with work and have had to drop most of their extracurriculars.
Those kids knew what they were getting into (the school is very clear about amount of work that goes into the diploma), which is why D chose to do a blend, because she knew what level of rigor she wanted.
She has AP lit, AP Calc AB, and IB Compsci HL, IB Bio HL, and IB Physics SL because in each case she picked the class that best matched up with what she wanted to accomplish and the IB diploma did not give her enough flexibility. She is taking an on-level history class which is her “breather” class (because history does not interest her that much). She has 1 serious extracurricular and one “fun” extra curricular, and has enough time to do them.
So I’d say to your kid-know thyself.
The hybrid approach that @MotherOfDragons daughter is pursuing is great for some kids.
But be aware that not all IB schools permit it. In some schools, you either have to be a full IB diploma candidate or not participate in IB at all.
My D1’s school offered the IB Diploma and the IB Certificate.
My impression of the IB program is that it is definitely writing-heavy. Even in math classes, you have to do some kind of writing-based project at least once a year, and the English and history classes are very writing-heavy. And if your kid is doing the IB diploma with the “extended essay” (which is a very long, intensive research project that they work on for many months), that’s probably the most intensive writing project they’ll do until they do their senior thesis in college. So on the one hand, this is great preparation for any kind of liberal arts college experience. On the other, plenty of kids who never take an IB class seem to do just fine at liberal arts colleges.
I would agree that IB classes do not seem to be valued by many colleges as much as AP classes, though there are some colleges out there that do give a lot of weight to IB classes. And I know one student at the Pratt School of Design in NYC who couldn’t get any credit for her IB classes at all, because she didn’t do the IB diploma and Pratt had a rule that you have to have the diploma for your class credit to count. So she ended up taking a bunch of classes her freshman year that she’d already taken. Don’t know how widespread that kind of policy is, but it’s worth thinking about if your student has a choice between AP and IB classes.
D’s school offers standard IB (11-12) and also an accelerated IB program (10-11) for kids who tested top 2-5%ish sometime between K and 8th grade. A disproportionate number of the accelerated kids (often boys) drop IB after the first year because it demands fairly high level executive functioning. My older kid did the standard APs in classes he cared about. Kid 2 is doing full IB. Different kids will succeed in different programs. The important thing is find a fit and maximize rigor (you might not be able to do both at the same school.)
In some other countries, IB is offered as the equivalent of grades 12-13.
Others have touched on this, but one advantage we found to our (large public) school’s Cambridge AICE program (AICE is very similar to IB), was the students. It grouped our children with similar high performing students, and kept them together for all 4 years of high school. The high school has about 600 students in each grade, but less than 100 AICE students. It’s really a school, within a school. Of course, they still mixed with the other students in honor/AP classes and ECs (like sports), but it made it easier to make friends and limit some of the “shock” of high school.
My daughter was in a high school where there were 400 students in a grade, 100 of whom were in a selective-entry IB program that drew from the whole school district. There was definitely a school-within-a-school feeling.
There are pluses and minuses. It can be great to be with other high-performing students instead of feeling like a freak because you are one. But 100 can be a very small number of people sometimes. And some IB or other special programs are even smaller.
Last year they graduated 29 kids with the full IB diploma from a school of 3,000 (yeah ridiculously huge). DD16 notices there is an increasing insularity between the full IB kids and the ones that take some of the classes. Which she thinks is ok-she says they need each other to get through it. Not being able to take the study halls with them is kind of a bummer for her though (they have special study periods that are IB diploma only), but she’s usually able to skype with them about the classes they share if there’s something she’s stuck on.
The AP classes in our school will let anyone in, and she says there are some kids in those classes (esp. the history classes and the “soft” AP classes like Human Geo and Enviro science), that really shouldn’t be doing that level of work, and don’t do well on the tests.
DD15 (sophomore) is trying to decide whether to go full IB next year or not. Another poster mentioned needing a lot of executive function abilities to do well. I think to an extent that is true, but I’ve also seen (at least at our school) that the IB forces you to develop better executive function skills, and that’s what I’d consider an intangible benefit of the IB diploma.
DD15 is a big idea creative starburst-type thinker that could benefit from practicing more executive function skills-at this point we’re trying to figure out if the full IB is too much discipline for her style of thinking and learning, or whether it will really bring out the best in her. She has time to figure it out, though-they don’t pick the IB track until next spring.