IB Programs

Marian
Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:15:07 +0000

At our school we only have HL English and HL History (that’s one of my complaints, actually, since it biases the GPAs against the math/science kids). Do any of you with kids in US IB programs have SL English and SL History classes? If so, are they available as part of the Diploma Programme or are they only for certificate students?



At the IB school my daughter attended (which is the same one that Counting Down’s son now attends), all IB students must take English and History HL. Their history course emphasizes Europe and Russia.

It is my understanding that this arrangement was made because it was the only way in which IB students could fulfill both the IB requirements and the state requirements for graduation in English and History.

The state requires four years of English for graduation. Thus, it made sense to require HL English, a two-year course, for the IB students. Otherwise, they would have had to take an extra English course outside the IB program in order to fulfill the state graduation requirement, while simultaneously taking an HL course in some other subject. That would actually be MORE difficult.

The state requires a one-year course in Modern World History. The IB History (Europe) curriculum covers most but not all of the topics required by the state. Additional material on the history of Asia and Africa has to be added to the curriculum to meet the state requirements. Apparently, it made more sense to add the extra topics to the two-year HL course than to try to squish them into the one-year SL course. I believe that at some other high schools, history is handled differently, with students taking HL History of the Americas while simultaneously fulfilling their state’s U.S. history requirement for graduation. I guess that would work in a similar way, but at our school, the kids fulfill the U.S. history requirement separately, during the pre-IB years.

The fact that U.S. IB programs have to go through these kinds of contortions to make it possible for their students to fulfill both the IB diploma requirements and the state graduation requirements is one of the reasons why IB, in the United States, often is not appealing to math/science-oriented students. Certainly, the worldwide IB program was not intended to be anti-science, but as implemented in the U.S., it often turns out that way. (And one of the weirder results of this is that the IB program at our school is about two-thirds female – which is a lot of fun for the straight guys.)

CountingDown, in my daughter’s class, the success rate on the IB exams was 100%. It was a good year. But this was also the class with 36 NMFs, when the typical number is no more than 25. So it may just have been a more-qualified-than-usual class overall.