<p>Princedog, I was wrong about foreign language. Thanks for catching my mistake.</p>
<p>I wonder, though, whether extended essays can really be on “whatever topic you choose.” </p>
<p>My daughter chose a topic, wrote a proposal on it, and spent more than a month doing library research. Then her advisor looked more thoroughly at the rubrics and told her she had to change the topic because what she had planned to do didn’t fit neatly into either the History or Politics rubrics; it was somewhere in between the two, and the advisor thought she would get a zero because some of the items in the rubrics didn’t apply to the topic. She had to change to an entirely different topic suggested by the advisor, which was of no interest to her at all. </p>
<p>I wonder how often this sort of thing happens. It doesn’t seem to be limited to social studies. I have heard, for example, that science-oriented people should never pick a biochemistry topic because it doesn’t fit neatly into either the Biology or Chemistry rubrics and will almost certainly receive a zero.</p>
<p>Our school system has IB magnet schools for elem., middle and high school. Admittance to all is by lottery, not selective. The high school IB programs are housed in regular high schools so only a small percentage of the students at the h.s are actually in the IB program.</p>
<p>That also happens in college. This is why students are asked to clear their topics with their instructors well ahead of time and are often asked to submit a prospectus as well. This can be a paragraph or so. I’ve heard of history papers that were more like policy papers, papers for courses on foreign cultures that had more science than culture, and so on. The students do get penalized for not knowing the difference between disciplines.</p>
<p>To be fair, IB is a bit annoyingly picky about EEs fitting into the subject categories. However, this is easily solved by the student not becoming wedded to a topic and insisting upon cramming it into a subject area where it doesn’t really fit.
I’m glad that Princedog mentioned the Pastiche option for World Lit II, because that’s what I did! It was definitely a lot of fun, and what I consider probably one of the best things, if not the best thing, that I turned into IB.</p>
<p>my son just completed a 3 year middle IB program and it was excellent. It offered much more than the normal curriculum and was more challenging. The program was open to all students to apply. They limited the number of gifted children they would accept to insure that there was a diverse group. The one factor that tied them together was 1. they wanted to participate 2. the parents were involved and had to sign off on the application. 3. they could be kicked out for grades or behavioral reasons. </p>
<p>HOwever, I must say the ones that chose to not enter this program did not because they did not want the rigor of the curriculum the first year. But by the second year, those parents/students were asking to join so they created more room in the program for them.</p>
<p>Those classes outside of the IB middle program tended to be very transient, low income students whose parents were not in stable situations for long enough to participate. </p>
<p>For my son, it provided basically a stable, private school education for free. he will enter the H.S. IB program next year and will be ahead of the normal track. OUr middle school had several dif course levels, general, honors and gifted. It was a good alternative.</p>
<p>We go through several steps with the advisor discussing first - you’re supposed to think up a few ideas. I did history, and our history department has a lot of knowledge. The one problem some people ran into was that they wanted a somewhat random area of history that was hard to find an advisor for, but in the end one was always found. They only take on papers they have a good working knowledge of. I suspect maybe the advisor may have specialized in an area other than the one your daughter was interested in, which can present the problem of entirely different topics, rather than the advisor being able to guide the student towards a different aspect. This is probably more a problem in the magnet/private programs which are smaller; I go to a public school that isn’t big, but relatively, it’s still bigger and non-IB teachers will advise in their specialty too, which opens up more options for people. And it keeps the papers for one advisor from stacking up, I saw less satisfaction with the discourse and feedback with really popular advisers who were advising ten papers - there just isn’t the time. My advisor had two and we’re good friends, so we coordinated our schedules for meeting with him.</p>
<p>I gave him a general area of interest (1968 election) and then we narrowed down from there and he did come up with the suggestion for the focus/aspect of the paper and it was very good, he gave several ideas and we refined them. However a lot of the science proposals get rejected, like my friend wanted to do something with measuring road surfaces and the physics teacher basically told her it was going to be complicated/dangerous/impossible to conduct the actual experiment, so she chose another topic. I haven’t heard much about topics falling between rubrics if done right; mine was about politics but we made sure it was a historical account. For the first part I basically went for an overview of tactics and then went into analysis, comparision to modern campaigns. You can analyze historical politics as long as the focus is on a specific event and it happened several decades ago, and you have generally accepted secondary sources on it.</p>