<p>Canadian. need help to decide taking AP or IB (International Baccalaureate) program in the high school, which would be better for the Yale dream ?</p>
<p>Thanks ! ( feel free to move the thread )</p>
<p>im an IB student , currently a junior, and i can tell you that for me IB kicks AP a**.It’s just a more rigorous program and we become more well rounded.(ive been told this by teacher who have taught at both programs and all of them prefer ib over ap).
Im from a very small international school.We get anything between 30-40 people graduating each year. I can tell you that we have alumn attending Harvard,University of Chicago,University of Pennsylvania and YALE.</p>
<p>IB is far more rigorous, at least for the final two years. You’ll have lots of more homework and internal assessment to do in the IB.
As for the syllabus material, I don’t think there should be a big difference, IB HL stuff may be a bit more extensive in some cases.
But overally, both should work fine.</p>
<p>Owh and I’m an IB senior, and I got into many school including Yale, Harvard, Stanford and so on. So it definitely works for colleges. ;)</p>
<p>Definitely IB. Even though it didn’t help me much for college admissions (no ivy admissions 
), it’s still an amazing program.</p>
<p>Purportedly both programs enjoy equal respect in college admissions. IB is conceived of as an integrated program which, if offered in its full version, can be complicated and costly for schools to adopt. AP courses are “siloed” and easier to add to existing high school curricula as terminal courses. AP courses and students are, consequently, far more common. It could be argued that some admissions offices might be more comfortable in evaluating AP transcripts because of their higher frequency, but this is not apt to be true at Yale and its peer schools.</p>
<p>My advice would be to choose a program for reasons other than its potential impact on your admissability because, in this regard, the programs are equal. I cannot comment on the relative difficulty of the programs but if, as the posters above state, IB is harder, you might get a better reward-to-effort ratio pursuing AP.</p>
<p>oso123, Thank you for the inputs!</p>
<p>Undergraduate, Descartesz,
Thank you for the replies!</p>
<p>chibistar6,</p>
<p>Could you pls give more details about “(no ivy admissions)” you mentioned ?</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>I’m at High School in the Netherlands, where I do VWO which is the same/little higher leven than IB. I recommend you to choose the hardest program you can get, because well, IB isn’t really that hard after all. I don’t know if you can get higher than IB in the USA, but if you can, go for it!</p>
<p>I think the best answer here is that you should choose the one that is best in your school. Both are well thought-of by selective colleges–but not all IB programs are created equal. Some are well-established, well-staffed, and may be selective. Others are new and not as well staffed or supported.</p>
<p>@eadaddy: I think chibi is stating that he had no ivy admissions this year.</p>
<p>But remember, that’s not a rule or anything… I’m studying in a school that does IB, and I’ve been accepted to Yale(enrolling), Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell, among many more, while I’ve had other classmates (who also do IB) that got admitted to Harvard, Yale, Cornell, MIT, Amherst, etc.</p>
<p>But ya, hunt has a major point there. If your school isn’t good in the IB, you don’t stand a chance… :/</p>
<p>Hunt makes a good point but if both IB and AP options are equally good in your school, it probably looks more impressive to do IB and do well in it. My D did not have the IB option and did very well with APs too. But if you’re selecting AP classes, make sure you take the ‘core’ APs instead of ‘fluff’ APs. I think it matters which APs you took, more than how many APs you took. AP Human Geography cannot be a substitute for AP US History, AP Enviro Science is not equivalent to AP Chemistry.</p>
<p>IB is an absolutely amazing program, which you should strongly consider irrespective of what Yale may think. The difficulty of IB varies greatly from school to school. IB in general does perhaps look more impressive than a bunch of fluff AP’s.</p>
<p>I’ve actually grown to hate IB for all its internal assessments and things like that. People who don’t choose the IB program cite the extended essay as their main deterrant. Try doing a total of 4 IB math portfolios over 3 years because the first two were thrown out due to a change in the IB instructions. That means over 60 pages of work total (ughh). Regardless I don’t regret doing the program because it definitely helps you stand out, especially at an IB school. Anyone aiming to get into the nation’s top colleges should do whatever it takes to stand out, imo.</p>