Is IB worth it?

guruofgreatness
Mon, 04 Apr 2011 22:25:38 +0000

People are right in most things they say here. I’m in 12th grade and did the IB Diploma program. You should know that it is EXTREMELY time-exhausting. If you want to do well, it needs to have precedence over your social life and many times you’ll be home on a saturday night cramming pages-worth of History to prepare for an exam instead of going out. Be ready for that. If you’re school has AP, I’d say do a mix of AP and IB. If it doesn’t, go for the full program.

It is impressive to colleges, but not as well known as AP is. I applied as an OOS student to the University of Florida and received a scholarship that was almost equivalent to a full ride, which I credit to IB and Florida’s love of the IB program.

IB is very very intensive. Also, I had overall a bad experience with it because of the workload and because I didn’t agree with how the program was structured and felt it contradicted itself at times. For example, in the Theory of Knowledge class I took, IB said it wants us to question everything we are told and be independent thinkers and such. It was essentially a philosophy class. However, it turned out to preach information to us that we needed to learn without questioning, and we had to follow IB’s format of thinking and analyzing instead of using our own format. I absolutely hated this class and wished that my school offered an alternative to it. I wasted hours and hours BSing presentations and papers and I feel like I wasted my time on this class. Another big thing is that for our IAs, which are basically lab reports and papers, my bio and physics teachers have urged us to do very very simple experiments (I’m talking middle-school level here) because IB gives bad grades to students with challenging experiments. I absolutely abhor this policy and it is what has made me realize that IB won’t help you learn very much.

If you skimmed or skipped the body of this post (sorry its long), please read this next part carefully. My school requires students to take the IB program so I had no choice. Would I prefer AP to it? Absolutely. But when tons of AP students are asked if they’d prefer IB, they scream yes as well. If you take AP or IB, you’ll hate them. They require tons of studying. But that’s the only helpful thing from IB - a lot of high school students screw up in college because they can’t handle the workload. IB gives you a tremendous workload so when you go to college you don’t cringe at the sight of all the books and notes. Not a single alumnus from my school feels that IB was worth it, but not a single one feels that their college workloads are too difficult (even Ivy league students and engineergs) because IB prepared them for rigorous workloads. Overall, the IB program sucks. It doesn’t teach you much so much as it forces you to memorize tons of excessive information and think the way its creators wants you to think. It does teach you discipline and time management, though, and that is why its worth the trouble.

These are the courses I was happy with taking:

-World History
-English (somewhat, some of the books we had to read were terrible though)
-Bio (loved the lectures so if you have a good teacher go for it. I learned a ton through this, but the IAs are worthless in learning but teach you how to conduct experiments and the tests are crap because they’re all essays and your answers need to include facts that IB considers relevant and correct, but not which may actually be correct and relevant in your eyes or in others’ eyes.)
-Spanish (I actually learned how to read, write, and speak Spanish from this class unlike my past Spanish classes)

The courses I hated:
-Theory of Knowledge (completely contradictory)
-Physics (I would highly recommend taking AP instead or doing some alternative)
-Math (the course was eh, the books mostly suck, and the AP course is more challenging and teaches you better imo)