If IB are harder than AP, then why isn’t IB favored over AP by college admission officers?
Who says it is not? We have heard many US admissions officers talk about how much they respect and IB Diploma and many of them are currently re-working how they give credit for IB classes to reflect the rigour of the IB.
IB is less known at many schools. We also found that AP was more highly regarded but I truly think its due to ignorance not factual data. From my experience, IB is much more rigorous. D attended an IB school but remained friends with her middle school buddies, most of whom were also honor students and took mostly AP classes. Not one of them had the kind of caseload she did.
It is quite a process for a school to become an IB school, so they are a bit rarer. Many local districts dislike the idea of ceding curriculum decisions to someone else, particularly someone foreign. AP is much easier to implement.
AP is also ceding curriculum decisions to someone else, but it can be done on a course by course basis, rather than having to do it for most of the curriculum or nothing like the IB diploma program.
From all of the comments on these forums, IB seems to be a lot of work. However, colleges do not seem to offer significantly higher advanced placement overall for IB HL scores than for AP scores. If there is value in the extra work of IB, it is probably in the “intangibles” like training the student for time management and such, and/or extra topics in IB courses that may not be present in standard or AP courses that could be considered enrichment but do not give additional advanced placement in college.
It is absolutely ridiculous, that for example, many colleges give a semester credit for a 4 or 5 in an AP class, but no credit at all for 7 in the equivalent SL IB class. It is much harder to get that 7.
You’re overlooking that some colleges offer scholarships to IB students. The number of colleges offering scholarships for AP exams is rather smaller, I think. Examples:
Our school is implementing IB next year. The process began five years ago. Our school also offers 18 APs. Not many of the high schools in our very competitive county have IB yet. IB is simply not as well-known, but at very selective colleges, it is highly regarded and known to be rigorous. I expect at some point soon, selective colleges will begin giving more credit for IB courses as it becomes more well known. It takes time for the wider college community to become comfortable with new trends I guess.
A high school students academic rigor is judged by the schedule taken compared to what courses are available at the school.
@ucbalumnus , you are right about AP. And it is American and is scored by Americans. As long as a school covers the material that’s on the AP, they can do whatever else they want during the year. Many boarding schools don’t offer AP classes but their students can take the exam. I realize that’s not the norm, but it’s hard to imagine this could work for an IB course, in particular because IB has a number of other requirements besides the year end test.
Really depends on the school. I go to a high school that only offers AP and regular classes. Some HS offer honor classes instead of AP and some do both. Not too familiar with IB though
^^^ It is off topic a bit but my understanding is that AP courses follow a very specific curriculum so high schools cannot do what they want during the year.
Our public HS stopped offering AP courses because they did not want to be tied to that curriculum – the school gave a new name to their highest level courses and altered the curriculum as they saw fit. This same thing has been done at some private schools in the area. Many students still take the AP exams but they are responsible for covering any material not covered by the HS course on their own. It hasn’t been an issue – students continue to do very well on the AP exams and there has been no impact on college admissions.
Back to the OP’s question, from what I understand, the top colleges want students who take the most rigorous courseload available at their HS and don’t spend much time worrying about if the courses are AP, IB, or called by another name.
OP - You should ask the question from the student’s point of view as opposed to the college’s. AdComs do not favor either IB or AP. It’s the course rigor that they value.
Whether you should take IB or AP depends on your preference, and that’s what you’d need to figure out as to which fits your learning style better. At my son’s high school, which offers both IB and AP, most kids who initially opted for IB end up dropping out. IB requires extra work: homework and class assignments are more time consuming; there’s MYP Personal Project during sophomore year and the Extended Essay in senior year plus the mandatory community service requirement. IB has curriculum requirements and therefore offers perhaps a more well rounded education whereas AP is a la carte choice driven and therefore much more flexible.
Based on anecdotal evidences, those students who graduated IB track seem to fare better in college, perhaps due to well developed skills in time and work load management and the experience completing the extended essay and the personal project.
Although common wisdom is to take the AP route if you’re involved in time consuming ECs, my son chose IB over AP in spite of brutal EC commitments, and his junior year and the first semester of his senior year were a living hell. It was all worth it, though, as we feel that he’d transition to college without much culture shock.
Because the IB Diploma is that – a diploma – if you do the whole thing, you’ll be locked into certain types of courses. Students at our school who did NOT do the diploma made their decision because they didn’t want to do a foreign language to that level or because they wanted to take more science classes and their IB schedule wouldn’t allow it. The generally took a combination of IB and AP classes and colleges were convinced of the rigor. For any student with the choice of IB and AP, you should consider what you’re interested in and how to study that rather than “what colleges think”.
The IB SL course may be harder or more work, but may not be as advanced. For example, the IB physics courses (both SL and HL) are non-calculus-based; even if they are harder or more work than AP physics C courses, the latter (which use calculus) are more advanced are more likely to give useful advanced placement in college.
@ucbalumnus every US school my daughter applied to had a blanket no credit for IB SL exams policy.
My kids took IB SL Econ. It covered everything on BOTH econ exams and more. The teacher said anyone with a 6 on the exam should get a 5 on both AP exams.
But schools give no credit for IB SL Econ.
@VickiSoCal I think part of the issue is the poor fit between some of the IB courses and the relevant courses at US colleges. Some of the IB courses tend to sample from several areas within a discipline. In Econ, for example, IB SL covers micro, macro, development, and international. Few college intro Econ courses are structured like that. The depth in micro and macro is less than in a comparable ap course, and the ap course actually overlaps very well with the way Econ is offered at most colleges. The same is true in math, and don’t even get me started on physics. So I think, as @ucbalumnus states, the courses and tests may be hard. But often they don’t have the necessary depth and do not quite match up with corresponding college courses as well as ap courses. So the colleges may recognize the rigor, but they can’t really give credit for macro and macro if a student covered half of each, and then studied other sub-fields (to get at IB’s emphasis on breadth).
Almost of the kids who take SL Econ at our school take both AP tests with no extra prep. Scores aren’t back yet, but the kid felt very good about both.
In the 4 languages our school offers the 4th year AP kids and SL kids are in the same class and most kids take both tests because they know the SL test won’t get them credit.
In fact the vast majority of kids taking any SL class at our school also take an AP test and on average do better than the kids in the straight AP classes.
@VickiSoCal that probably says more about your school than it does the IB subject brief, or whether the Econ SL exam is a good indication of subject mastery for a typical micro / macro sequence. Don’t get me wrong-- I think IB has many strengths. But matching up well with US college course content is not one of them.