<p>My apologies, I should have put YMMV depending on the particular IB program. I could give specific examples as to why my statements are true for our school, but what’s the point?</p>
<p>Just be sure to check out your IB program thoroughly.</p>
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<p>Not necessarily. </p>
<p>I live in a neighboring school district from CountingDown and Marian, and though IB has been in some of my district’s high schools for two or more decades, IB would be an exceedingly poor choice here. Very limiting, poorly taught, and NO students get the IB diploma. In my district, a good student would be far better served by AP… or even better, moving to CD’s and Marian’s district!!</p>
<p>owlice: Again, the quality of your school does influence how IB/AP are taught – the right choice really depends on a variety of factors, but college admissions officers are aware that the requirements for IB are more rigorous when compared to the requirements for AP, and that’s all.</p>
<p>Oh, dear. legendofmax, there are some college admissions officers who think that; there are some who don’t. </p>
<p>And as I mentioned, a student who has taken IB in my district would likely have been better served, academically and in college admissions, by AP instead. YMMV, of course.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t help the OP. What will help the OP is looking at the programs available to him/her and evaluating them, and thinking through how he/she likes to work, and where he/she is likely to go to college. If the OP isn’t planning to go to college in Florida, it doesn’t matter what Florida colleges think of IB.</p>
<p>Things the OP should look for include how many students get the IB diploma, what the average scores are on the tests, IB and AP, at the high schools under consideration, how long the programs have existed at the schools, how much flexibility each program has and in which subjects, how big the classes are, and so on. Another thing to consider is what supports are available to the student if the teacher for a class is just awful (since that does happen, alas!), and this goes for IB or AP. Are self-study materials available to the student? Is tutoring available (at the school, in the community, or commercially) if needed? Is test prep? </p>
<p>As CountingDown mentions, IB is a great choice for her S2, but her S1 wouldn’t consider it at all. Just like colleges, fit is important!</p>
<p>Hi, owlice!!! :)</p>
<p>OP – Be aware that a full IB diploma requires that one takes exams in six different subject areas. In most full IB programs I’ve heard about, the school decides what some of your HL exams will be – at S2’s school, that is English and European History. (The school’s requirements for HL tend to tie in with state graduation requirements.) The third HL is the student’s choice. Not all IB programs offer SL and HL exams in all areas or subjects – we know someone who was looking for a HL Chemistry class two years ago and couldn’t find a HS in our area, public or private, who offered it. There is no self-study in IB. If your school has six or seven periods a day, plus you have to meet state-required health/PE/art/etc. courses, it can be very difficult to fit in other electives.</p>
<p>SL exams are not given much, if any college credit. The main exception seems to be the foreign language SL exams. As a result, many students at S2’s schools take the corresponding AP exams for the IB SL courses they take, which means more money and more testing time. At our house, it did not mean more studying. There was no time to do so in the first place, as S continued to have classes and major assignments throughout the three weeks of IB/AP exams.</p>
<p>If you are weak in one area, there is no escaping it. If you are not adept at foreign languages, buckle up. You must get through at least five years of one in IB. S2 knew that he would have a lower GPA than at our local HS by attending this IB program and took it on willingly nonetheless. I hate to sound so down on IB – S2 has loved it and has a terrific HS experience, but as a parent, this has been a tough road. He has worked harder than we ever imagined would be necessary.</p>
<p>If you are considering a full IB program to get a leg up in college admissions, think carefully. It is a considerable time and energy commitment if it’s a truly good program.</p>
<p>Ask how many students get IB diplomas vs. certificates. Certificates are for passing an IB class and exam succesfully. The diploma is for the whole enchilada, plus CAS, TOK and EE. Ask how many students start out in the program and how many finish w/diplomas vs. certificates.</p>
<p>The IB is really all about how it’s implemented. I went to an international school where only the IB was offered; no AP. The teachers focused and taught to the IB syllabus, and that worked. I did very well, and the IB prepared me very well for university. However, if you go to a school where teachers don’t know how to teach the IB, or combine AP and IB into the same class, I’d recommend not doing the IB. It’s just not worth it, and you won’t get a good score at the end.</p>
<p>I loved doing the IB. It wasn’t rote memorisation, like the AP. I had to think and apply my knowledge to new situations. I learnt proper time management, and my critical thinking skills were much improved by the experience.</p>
<p>What I was told by faculty is that the standards for science and foreign language are higher in AP and the standards in English and Social Studies are higher in IB. However, those are minimum standards; what takes place in your school may be different. </p>
<p>When you are evaluating a program, it may be hard to compare similar students in each program because there will be students in AP who only excel in one subject. To compare an IB with an AP kid, you would need to compare kids who take AP across the board with kids who take IB across the board and see where they go and how they are regarded. Another factor is that some IB programs are magnet programs or located within exclusive schools. At that point, you are really evaluating the magnet program because the same students are not taking AP as are enrolled in the IB program.</p>
<p>One factor to consider is how long your individual school has had the IB program. For many years, IB flew under the radar of the general public (although college adcoms were certainly well aware of it). Now it’s almost an educational fad, at least out here in Calif. When my D started IBMYP in 6th grade, there were only 5 districts in the entire state that offered it. Now there are 2 districts just here in the Sacramento area that are trying to get it up and running. (You know it has become super-trendy when one of the Housewives of New York is trying to get her child into IB!)</p>
<p>The reason this is important is that IB is different in some ways from the traditional American curriculum, and it takes a while for a school to get it running properly. As others have said, it is not a collections of classes; it is an integrated program with extra requirements (EE, CAS), and it needs to be run by teachers, coordinators, and administrators who have IB training and experience. It is a unique way of approaching a rigorous education. I’d stay away from an IB program that is less than 10 years old at a given school.</p>
<p>To answer your question, OP, I think that both IB and AP are looked on with favor by admissions officers. Ask your GC if both programs earn the “most rigorous” rating at your school. </p>
<p>BTW, my D is finding that IB prepared her wonderfully for the academics of college. Like Spriteling, she feels especially that the critical thinking that IB teaches is serving her very well.</p>
<p>My Ds have done IB at an international school and I am quite pleased with the program. I especially love the fact that if you do full diploma, you come out with a credential that is recognized in almost every country and permits you to easily attend a university in most parts of the world.</p>
<p>The one small problem I have with it is that the math curriculum in IB is quite different from AP calculus. My D2 will self study AP calculus AB later this year because, since she is planning on majoring in life sciences at college in the U.S. next year, we feel she might be behind in her math placement if she is not familiar with some calculus concepts not covered in IB. She is in SL which includes calculus but the focus is different. I am told HL would not have been any better at preparing for the AP exam.</p>
<p>My S started in the IB program and ended up not doing the full diploma but a mixture of AP and IB. He prefers the IB courses overall for their emphasis on the doing rather than the memorizing, but he absolutely failed at managing all of the requirements with TOK, CAS, and the very structured HL English. One look at the summer assignment after 10th grade for the English IB HL and he went to his counselor and asked to drop out of the program. Highly structured and organized analysis of Crime and Punsihment for 4 months was just going to kill him…</p>
<p>The school always said that the hallmark of the successful IB student is organizational skills…is this why we have many more girls in the program than boys…is this true at your schools too? </p>
<p>The difference between AP Art Studio and IB Art (HL) is very good at showing the philosophical/educational differences in the approach. AP emphasizes getting lots of pieces done and refined using several different mediums so the kids at graduation have a portfolio demonstrating their skills in various areas; IB emphasizes the student’s sketch book where they document their ideas and steps in creating art and focus on a theme for over one to two years. They are required to produce a portfolio of art but the emphasis is on the development and implementation of creative ideas rather than refined and finished pieces demonstrating technical skills. In general, I see this same difference even in the math and science courses. AP–mastery of skills and knowledge; IB–critical thinking, and articulating a unique voice/ideas of the student. This is why many US Colleges see the science prep for IB “weaker” than AP because the IB student will not, perhaps, know many of the “facts” in the field. However, in Europe they prefer the IB because they figure a well prepared critical and independent thinker with lots of hands on experience in the lab can memorize needed factoids as needed during their college years. </p>
<p>Anyway, love the IB approach but it isn’t for every kid or every subject, perhaps. Also, many schools give no credit for SL (as noted above) or require 7s but accept 4 or 5 on AP. Not really fair, but I don’t think it is a good idea to rush through college or skip intro classes except foreign language.</p>
<p>Well it sounds like the math I might be able to do as an elective (Calculus BC) and now what concerns me is language. They don’t offer latin at this other school and they certainly don’t offer IB latin. Is it possible to self study? Ive started Latin already and the school requires two years of a language to even get into IB… Fii</p>
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My daugher is a sophomore at the same IB program Marian and CountingDown are discussing, and my son graduated from it and is now a freshman at Yale. He didn’t have great organizational skills when he started the program, but he was forced to develop them, and he reports that he is finding the college workload easier for him than many of his classmates. My daughter was (somewhat) more organized by nature.</p>
<p>I’d add one thing about credit from AP and IB: it may not matter very much, depending on the college. Unless you want to graduate in less than four years, at Yale and similar schools you will not get much advantage from either AP or IB, except maybe for placement in math or foreign language–and the school has its own placement tests. My son did well enough on his French AP to place in a higher-level French class, but if he hadn’t, he would have just taken the college placement test. None of his other AP or IB scores did anything for him at all.</p>
<p>The IB program that Hunt, Counting Down, and I are all familiar with has more female than male students, but I don’t know whether this reflects anything about organizational skills. Instead, it may be attributable to the existence of a science-math-computer science magnet program in the same district, which attacts more male than female students.</p>
<p>Given these two choices of magnet programs, there seems to be a tendency for more boys to choose the math/science program and more girls to choose the more liberal arts-oriented IB program. </p>
<p>Within the IB program, at least at the time that my daughter was there, there didn’t seem to be any correlation between gender and success. There were both boys and girls among the most successful students in the program and among those who barely squeaked by.</p>
<p>My daughter is a junior at Cornell, and she found the academic transition to college quite easy. She felt very well prepared, with excellent study skills and time-management skills and decent writing skills, all as a result of IB.</p>
<p>I have noticed that a lot of colleges will give credit for 4s or 5s on AP tests, but only for a 7 on an IB HL. I looked fairly extensively at IB and AP curricula, and I thought (a) the IB HL courses were much more impressive than APs, and the SL courses were more AP-equivalent, and (b) IB 7s meant more than AP 5s. </p>
<p>My son took the Latin SL course rather than AP Vergil because he liked the syllabus better (and because his school had agreed to get the Latin teacher IB-trained to accommodate him and one other student when they had tentatively agreed to join the IB diploma program). The amount of work and difficulty level of the two courses was very similar, and there was probably a 50% overlap in the actual material studied. He took the University of Chicago Latin placement exam, and neither the AP nor the IB course had covered the sorts of texts that represented the highest level tested by that exam (which supposedly represented the third quarter of Latin at Chicago). Yet he would have received a complete exemption from the university’s language requirement for an AP 4, and nothing for an SL 6 (or 7, if he had gotten that). </p>
<p>I assume this disparity is slowly vanishing.</p>
<p>I don’t think colleges should give advanced placement for AP 4s, given that you can get a 4 on many AP tests without having learned much. But that’s just me.</p>
<p>An IB 6 is sort of an A minus, and an IB 7 (which is much rarer than an AP 5) is sort of an A plus. I would think that a college that gives credit for an AP 4 should certainly be giving credit for an IB 6, at least in an HL subject.</p>
<p>Marian, I agree with you to an extent. I feel that you should get credit if you have truly “Mastered” the material. Especially is one is entering into what most would consider a top notch college. I feel like one should have a solid A or A+ in the material. A 5 on an AP shows that level of mastery.</p>
<p>FYI My son is doing full IB and he is in classes with kids that are taking AP. Some of his IB classes are taken with AP kids, but he has to do all the extra stuff that is required of the IB program. The IB program has really taught him time management skills and a higher level of work. There is a lot that goes into the IB program that is why so many who enter into it drop out after a semester or two of being in it. My s has taken IB and AP exams, so he will get credit for both.</p>
<p>The colleges that my s has looked at have all asked him in his interviews if he is taking what they consider to be the toughest program"IB". That is not to say that taking an AP course-load is bad or will be viewed negatively, but we were asked if our school offers IB, so I take that to mean they do care. My son is enrolled in a large public high school. Admissions officers do have ways to find out if your school offers IB or not. I am happy that he has done IB and he is on track to get his diploma.</p>
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<p>Well, IB is certainly rigorous, but there are some students for whom the full IB diploma program is ill-suited, especially those who have specialized interests or those who are so highly accelerated in a particular subject that it is awkward to find a way to fit them into the IB diploma program without forcing them to discontinue study of that subject for a year or more. I think that a student who is in a high school with an IB program but who chose not to be an IB diploma candidate for a good reason would not necessarily be at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>My son went to a high school that did not have an IB program, but even if there had been one, it would have been a poor choice for him because his interests lay in only two areas – computer science and humanities/social sciences. (He ended up majoring in computer science and minoring in philosophy in college.) He minimized laboratory sciences and foreign languages in his high school curriculum to give himself more opportunities to take the courses he really wanted. If he had been in IB, this would not have been possible. I think that admissions officers would understand something like this.</p>
<p>Historically, the math/sci program has been 65/35 guys to girls and the IB program the other way around, though both are actively trying to remedy that.</p>
<p>As I mentioned upthread, IB was a total non-starter for S1 due to prior acceleration and a limited ceiling on IB coursework. He also dropped foreign language after level three in order to take other electives of greater interest. He has remedied the lesser emphasis on humanities in HS by going to UChicago for UG. ;)</p>
<p>I’m seeing more credit offered these days for an IB 6 on a HL exam. S2 has really learned to get organized and to manage his time well – and that will serve him well in college.</p>
<p>Pruneface – you cannot self-study an IB course. There are specific requirements as to classtime hours. How to meet your IB FL language requirements is an excellent quesion to pose to the program you are considering.</p>
<p>At my kids’ high school, there are several factors that limit the popularity of its small IB diploma program: (1) The number of class-hours required essentially makes it impossible for science kids to participate in research at local universities and labs, something many of them do starting in 9th grade. (The school has a very successful program for placing kids in labs.) Athletics and other extra-curriculars run into problems, too. (2) The math is one-size-fits-all, and the math skills of the best students are not. (3) It blocks kids from taking some popular electives that do not fit into standard curriculum slots (e.g., International Conflicts, Biochemistry, Astronomy, Writing For Publication). (4) Some humanities-oriented students want to take two foreign languages, and the IB scheduling can’t accommodate that. Also, there are one-size-fits-all problems here, too, since a few students are past the AP level in their language by the end of 10th grade. (5) Because of the foregoing, it is hard to build critical mass with the top students; even students for whom these are not personal issues don’t want to give up taking classes with their most stimulating peers.</p>
<p>As a result, the IB program suffers a little bit from second-class status, since it attracts very few of the most successful, most ambitious students. That notwithstanding that pretty much everyone who has looked at it agrees that the IB program in general is superior to an AP-centric curriculum.</p>
<p>I may just have to suck it up and use my latin skills to go straight into French II Pre-IB >_<</p>