<p>Karen – there is MAJOR overlap between IB and AP exam testing times. IB will not budge on scheduling; the school has to make special arrangements with College Board to give APs on alternative dates. (College Board is cooperative in that regard.)</p>
<p>AP is the first two weeks of May; IB is the first three weeks of May. With the schedule adjustments, many seniors taking the HL exams get AP exams bumped to the third week because of conflicts. Judging by this year’s schedule, S2 will have three APs rescheduled next year due to conflicts with IB exams.</p>
<p>Most of the SL exams at S2’s school are one year courses, so it makes the APs junior year very do-able in that sense. HL Bio is a double period senior year at his school, though, which really takes up a big chunk of one’s schedule.</p>
<p>Thanks, CountingDown. Our IB kids have also placed as high as 6th in the National Science Olympiad and we’ve had multiple Intel Scholarship winners in this decade. The kids also have an ongoing project involving a local watershed, and the quality of their data is so good that it’s been commissioned by the city government, the state water resources board, and UC Davis. Obviously science is a big focus here.</p>
<p>The point is, IB is not monolithic; while there is a program-wide curriculum and the tests are standardized thoughout the system, it is also true that individual schools can take one subject, in our case science, and run with it. Bottom line, parents who are researching IB for their kids need to look into the program at their particular school to know what its strengths and emphases are.</p>
<p>I suspect that one reason why our IB school does not particularly emphasize science is that it doesn’t attract a high proportion of science-oriented students. The school system also has a science-math magnet program (actually, there are now two of those, I believe), which tends to attract that population.</p>
<p>Every IB program – and every school system that includes it – is different.</p>
<p>Just to add a point on taking AP exams in the same courses as IB. It may not be necessary. Especially if your kid has an early admission, but even if it’s a regular admission, you may find that AP (and IB) exams may not have much impact. For example, at Yale, these exams do very little for you unless you want to accelerate. An exeption is getting a 5 on a foreign language AP, which can get you out of Yale’s placement test. But for other subjects, you can self-place, or there is a college placement test (i.e., music theory).</p>
<p>The catch in what Hunt is saying is that seniors usually have to sign up for AP exams before they receive their college acceptances, and policies on AP credit vary from college to college.</p>
<p>My daughter, who applied and was accepted to college Early Decision, was able to choose her senior year AP tests based on what her college does and does not give credit for. (In fact, she decided to take the AP English Language test as a senior, which is really weird in our school system, because it could (and did!) help her place out of a writing course requirement.) But Regular Decision students often do not have that option (except for the option of choosing not to show up for an AP exam you’ve already paid for).</p>