To IB or not to IB ... That is the question

marite
Sat, 23 Sep 2006 15:37:18 +0000

2dsdad:

I think the biggest issue is one of quality control. Whether it is AP or IB, exams are used as quality control mechanisms. In France, the bac, upon which the IB is modeled, is closely tied to the national curriculum and, in teaching that national curriculum, teachers teach to the test, with all the pros and cons associated with this description.
Still, there is a huge variation in success. My brother was unhappy with the 30% pass rate at the lycée in his working class/middle-class neighborhood and put his daughter in a private school that boasts a 100% pass-rate.
I never heard of predicted scores until I read about the IB. And, as I posted earlier, no college plans can be formulated until the actual scores are in hand.

As introduced into US high schools, the IB varies enormously in terms of quality of implementation. Yet, American colleges do not use actual exam scores in their admission decisions, and perhaps not even predicted scores. They only go by the fact that an applicant is enrolled in the IB program in making their decisions. (Credit for IB is decided after the student has matriculated, as is the case for AP credit)

The rapid expansion of IB curricula in underperforming schools raise concerns insofar as it is unclear whether the teaching corps is well trained and competent and the students well prepared for its rigors. From my limited experience of discussions to introduce an IB school into our community, the IB was indeed seen as a way to improve teaching and raise standards at one underperforming school. I believe there were two main considerations in play: the IB had a ready-made curriculum and thus a complete roadmap for instruction in grades 6-12, so the school did not have to research what to teach at each separate grade; although the IB curriculum did not really start until high school, there would be a pre-IB program in the middle school (6-8) to prepare the students for IB. In turn this would force the earlier grades to improve.

I suspect that this kind of reasoning was used in the districts that introduced IB (ours in the end gave up because too many other changes were occuring at the time). But absent good teachers with a real grasp of the IB curriculum and philosophy and absent well prepared students, the IB program will serve only a very small handful of students. It is expensive to run. It may or may not serve high schools very well.