Weird story, thus weird essay

equality4all
Mon, 04 Sep 2017 14:43:07 +0000

Hi there,
My high school experience was awful. I’m saying what literally happened, no more or less.

I went to a private school (in Canada) and received financial aid. I first thought that they were giving an opportunity to students who couldn’t afford. But soon I realized that I was bought so they can use me to promote their own students. They knew I would take their IB program and apply to universities in the US, and that is exactly why they decided to “buy” me.
If you don’t know how the IB program works, there’s something called the IA (Internal Assessment) that your predicted mark (the mark that goes to universities so basically the mark that plays a HUGE role in deciding your admission) is based heavily on. School marks IAs, and sends 5 of their choice to the IB external markers. The external markers pick 1 randomly out of 5, and if they think that particular assignment is graded too low, the whole class’ mark has to be highered, and vice versa. I took a course ahead (you do the IA and take the exam in grade 12 but I did in grade 11 for one course) and mine was marked low and sent to the IB as a sample. It was marked low because my final mark was higher. So if you’re not getting it, in a nutshell they are “sacrificing” an unimportant student like me. They give a mark much lower than my assignment’s quality (and therefore hurting me significantly in admission chances) so the whole class’ mark can get higher, which results in the students they promote to have basically a perfect mark. (idk about other schools, but it’s really terrible at my school that they obviously promote the students who attended the school since they were little)
With other courses, they sometimes even lowered my mark. I know they lowered it because the administration shares the equation for calculating the final mark with the students, and what I got on my final report was lower than what I calculated based on that. Other students’ marks almost always get boosted up. I’ve even seen some of other students’ reports, and it’s almost ridiculous how they have much lower marks on tests and assignments but get boosted up so much. I’m not subjectively exaggerating anything; I literally saw their test scores and final marks. Apparently the teachers are allowed to do that if they want to. So people getting bad marks get boosted at the end and get a mark higher than me, when I got much higher results almost all the time. How am I even supposed to defend myself against this?

I’m writing about this for prompt #2 on Common app (the hardship one) because this truly was a big hardship to me. It was so stressful to go through all this for 3 years. (I moved for last year because I really couldn’t endure it anymore)
But here’s a problem. Do YOU believe me? Do you think I’m lying or exaggerating anything? Because I’m not. I actually took out some things so my post won’t be too long (it already kind of is). My worst concert ATM is that admission officers won’t believe me because this isn’t something common.

Sorry for long post, but if you can give me any encouraging advice I would really appreciate it.
Thanks.