<p>Research (or Internships) takes considerable priority over coursework in virtually all cases. Law and Medical schools are the only places that will care about your GPA more than your research. It’s important, but as long as it’s 3.0 or higher your letters of recommendation and your research/employment history are both much more important for grad school and industry hiring.</p>
<p>The full IB is the most rigorous high school program that a student can take. I suggest you do the full IB and nothing more.</p>
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<p>I can’t believe use said that the IB has “useless” aspects. I’m completing my IB program in a few days, and all I can say is that I’ve grown so much over the past 2 years. Have they been hard? Yes. Have they been challenging? Yes. But from what I’ve learned and from what our past graduates have said, IB prepares you for college and for life. CAS is basically Community and Services and ensures that IB graduates are balanced people in society. TOK helps us question the world around us and not to be naive and believe everything we hear. Finally the EE is basically a thesis in where we write a 4000 word paper on the topic of our choice. In IB, you don’t have to liberty of not doing science if you suck or 2 languages just because you monolingual. So IB is better because it makes you a more balanced student (as opposed to AP where you could only take the courses you like). So unless you have experiences the program, don’t bad mouth it.</p>
<p>While Full IB does in fact attract the most intelligent students at my school, many of them say it is unrewarding. They feel that CAS is pointless (as you can write anything down and get hours) and that TOK, though stimulating in nature, is wasted as it is taught by unqualified instructors (art history and english teachers. Plus the Full IB coordinator at my school is corrupt. She put our valedictorian into academic U.S history and gave him honors credit, which incidentally prevented the salutatorian from claiming his deserved honor. She frequently goes out of her way to NA quizzes which, she says, her students were not “prepared” for. Full IB is treated as an elitist group at my school and often times these students do not get into better colleges. You mentioned that “IB is better because it makes you a more balanced student (as opposed to AP where you could only take the courses you like)” and “In IB, you don’t have to liberty of not doing science if you suck or 2 languages just because you monolingual.” It might behoove you to read the above posts in the fact that I am taking AP Bio, AP Physics C, AP Calc BC, IB Latin, and IB Ancient Greek. I have to go outside of my school to take GChem and Multivariable because we don’t offer it. I play two varsity sports, do MUN and debate, and am the president of three humanitarian/economic aid clubs. You can say I’m not well rounded but full IB does not necessarily make you any better. My curriculum undoubtedly harder than anyone in Full IB at my school.</p>
<p>One major of benefit of IB (at least at my HS) is that we got to double up on IB and AP tests. For example, the first years of Math HL and Bio HL were Calc AB AP and Bio AP and the second year of Math HL was a modified version of Calc BC AP. As a result, we got double the points in front of adcoms and we got double the empty units in undergrad.</p>
<p>That is a plus. I’m sure that differs among colleges but I can see credit bonuses.</p>
<p>Hi there! I am an incoming freshman at Berkeley and I took the IB route at my school. At my school, the classes were somewhat “combined”. For example, a student taking IB Bio HL or SL would take the AP Bio class during junior year and take the test as well. Same with IB History, so those taking IB had on their application both IB exams and AP exams (even the SL students took the AP exams which is a good thing since Berkeley doesnt accept credit for some IB SL classes). To be honest, it depends on how well you think you can do in it. My school is ranked as the third best IB school in California (even though it’s a public high school!) and several of our IB candidates made it to Berkeley, and several went on to prestigious privates. However, a lot of the students who chose the AP route got into Berkeley as well. So my advice is to take the route that you think you will do best in and still manage to excel and stand out in your extra-currics!</p>
<p>can i just say that 5 weeks is not long enough 2 correctly cover MV. having taken MV(at a university) while in high school, you would be definitely unprepared because they would have to leave out a lot of fun stuff. MV was the best college math class i took while in high school(i took 6) and you should def just take it during the school year at a university or cc</p>