<p>Ucbal- good question! In our HS AP and IB are considered equally rigorous so I really do not have an answer. The data that was presented to us at the parent meeting showed that IB students have a higher acceptance rate to selective colleges than AP students do, but I do not know why. After 3 months of researching IB, my daughter decided to stick with AP. The weird thing about our HS is that most kids in the top 10% ( 95%) do the AP track. The kids who do IB ( about 20 kids out of 380 in the grade) are typically kids who are not in the top 10% ( maybe 2 or 3 are in the top 10%). My daughter’s chemistry teacher told me that kids who do IB at our school are those that are " a little higher than average" She was surprised that my daughter originally chose IB over AP. My friend’s daughter graduated from our HS last year with her IB diploma and currently attends a top college. Her biggest complaint about IB in our school was the classroom environment. She felt that the AP students had a better classroom environment than IB in terms of the types of discussions that took place etc. My research has led me to believe that although the IB program is very rigorous and highly regarded, it is not quite there yet at OUR HS. The stronger kids still do the AP track, and that is why my daughter is not doing IB. Our HS allows any student to do IB if they want, while that is not true for AP. I know kids who struggled with school and chose IB because it was advertised as a " different way of learning," and these kids really struggled. Again, I think that IB is probably amazing but I think that our school is still in the process of figuring it out, and perhaps several years from now the program will be perfected. I still can’t figure out how kids in our HS who are really struggling academically are permitted to take a program that is considered " most rigorous." Nobody at our school can answer that question, which leads me to believe that the program is still new ( our HS has had it for about 8 years, so I guess it is still new). I am not showing disrespect to struggling students, but putting them in a classroom with AP students who may be in the top 2% is not fair to either. Neither group will have their needs met, and that is currently what our IB program is like, and I see that as a problem. Other than this issue, our HS is phenomenal. My older daughter’s friend was one of those students who struggled academically ie did poorly, had a lot of tutoring etc. This kid went into the IB program because it was advertised to her as a " different way of learning" with " different types of tests." This kid did not get the IB diploma and barely made it through HS. She was in IB classes with kids who were accepted to Cornell had Hopkins. That is what is so strange to me. The good news is that this kid currently attends a small college and is doing very well.</p>