<p>Well the Dean may not know but his admission officers known about the IB. From 2000-2005, my son's IB school had four graduates go to Georgetown, <a href="http://www.wis.edu/schoollife/univers_collegesofwisgradu.asp%5B/url%5D">http://www.wis.edu/schoollife/univers_collegesofwisgradu.asp</a>. This is not an insignificant number considering that there are only 30 or 40 or so students every year who go to American colleges.</p>
<p>What tsdad says is important and valid. In its inception, AP was not a prescription for a high school curriculum. It was an effort to standardize the placement tests that lots of elite colleges used to assess the skills of, and determine the graduation requirements for, entering freshmen. It was always about college placement and college credit, and only slowly morphed into a set of standards for what would get taught in certain "branded" high school courses.</p>
<p>IB, on the other hand, was/is an admirably utopian effort to standardize an ambitious high school curriculum on an international level, with several complementary goals: (1) Children of diplomats and multinational business executives should have a more seamless transition from a school in Country A to one in Country B. (2) Universities should have assurance that an IB diplomist from a school they'd never heard of can be compared to all other IB diplomists on the basis of grades, without further weighting or discounts. (3) The curriculum should be method-based, not content-based, and should reflect a true international consensus about what education kids should have pre-university. </p>
<p>The IB program also originated in the UK, and based itself on the structure of elite British secondary schools. I think it was intended to get students into Oxbridge colleges on equal footing with Eton graduates, not to provide advanced standing.</p>
<p>The advanced-standing issue is important in the US because of competition between the AP and IB programs, and because college education is both much more expensive for students and much more universal here compared to other countries. But I'm not sure that many people at IB HQ in Geneva care much about it.</p>
<p>At Harvard, a student may obtain Advanced Standing with 4 scores of 5 on APs (not all are eligible) or 3 scores of 7 on IB HL.</p>
<p>I think the problem isn't the credit isn't awarded for IB exams, just that it's easier to get it from AP exams in a way. You could take ten AP tests and get ten chances to get those 4 5s (although Harvard, like Yale, only awards this credit if you plan to graduate in three years or something). The policy on Ib states "diploma holder" with three 7s. Now in diploma, most people only take three HL exams and the max you can take is 4. I have 4 HLs, but one is a certificate (not going in my diploma score) because I need the SL version of that course in order to have the three required SLs. I'm not sure whether Harvard's policy would count the extra certificate score as one of the three HLs. </p>
<p>Anyway, I don't know of anyone that got 3 7s on their HL exams. Very difficult to do. IB exams comprise more than one paper. I got a 6 overall on SL Business, but I had a 7 on one paper and a 6 on the other, and I don't really know what I got on my internal assessment, apparently lower than a 7 because then it might have bumped me up. They limit the number of 7s internationally. They also put in difficult questions somewhat "beyond" the scope of the material in order to seperate the 6s from the 7s. I know in HL math there are often advanced algebra questions that do this...questions about range or domain that are tricky and almost everyone will put the same wrong answer, except the few kids who are truly "beyond" - those people get the points and the 7. It's just easier for some people to study the AP material hard and have a better chance at getting a 5. Although conversely I'd argue that IB may give more people more of a chance to succeed on a more "average" level, but it gives very few people the chance to reach the pinnacle of getting 7s on HL exams. Even three 7s on an SL exam would be rare. Although to tell you the truth I don't exactly know how rare it is to get 4 5s or if it's even rarer, not sure.</p>
<p>The AP and IB curricula are not identical, and U.S. college professors are more accustomed to AP. They may not know what to expect of a student who has only IB scores and may be uncertain of whether or not the student can safely skip an introductory course.</p>
<p>Example: The IB SL Spanish test requires students to write an academic essay in Spanish and to orally summarize and answer the examiner's questions about a published news article from a Spanish-speaking country. In some ways, these tasks are more sophisticated than those required on the AP test, and they require skills that AP students may not have. But the IB test is much less demanding than the AP test in terms of vocabulary. IB students get to choose from multiple essay topics and can therefore pick the one for which their vocabulary is strongest, and they choose their own news articles for the oral exam in advance and can therefore brush up on vocabulary related to the article. The essay topic on the AP test is much simpler and more generic than the IB essay topics, but students have no choice of topic. And the oral component of the AP test consists of describing what's going on in a four-panel comic strip -- again, with no choices of material and no opportunity to see the material in advance. This is very demanding in terms of vocabulary. For example, rumor has it that on one recent AP test, the comic strip involved a shopping cart. Those students who could not remember the Spanish word for "shopping cart" were screwed.</p>
<p>Another difference between AP and IB pertains to the teaching of economics. IB SL economics includes some international and developmental economics topics that are not included in AP economics and are not ordinarily taught in first-year economics courses in the U.S. But the IB SL curriculum omits some microeconomics topics that AP does include and that are always included in first-year U.S. microeconomics courses.</p>
<p>Are U.S. colleges prepared for these subtle differences in preparation?</p>
<p>The last thing anybody wants is for students to skip an introductory course and then flounder in the second-level course because the introductory course they took in high school was too different in scope from the college's introductory course. I suspect that one reason why colleges are more reluctant to give credit for IB than for AP is because they are less familiar with IB and don't want to take the risk of putting students into courses that they may not be prepared for.</p>
<p>I've been familiar and a staunch devotee of IB, as I was raised in Europe where that's all there was, it seemed. Did not bother to learn how it dovetails into US colleges' curriculums. I would have picked an IB program for my kids had there been anything nearby. Just assumed that there was a direct correlation to college courses as AP has. As Marite show, at Harvard it does work that way. But at many colleges, that is not the case, from all of this. And it makes sense that if the college does not recognize IB for credit, it is not going to be recognizing it for as rigorous of a curriculum either. Not to say that it is not. I still believe a full IB is as intense as it comes, but it appears that it is a rarity for a student to accomplish this--did not know about levels and partials. And if kids have to take APs to get college credit for IB courses, well, I think that is truly insanity. Too many tests as it is now.</p>
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The IB program also originated in the UK, and based itself on the structure of elite British secondary schools. I think it was intended to get students into Oxbridge colleges on equal footing with Eton graduates, not to provide advanced standing.
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<p>JHS: You're correct. But A-levels will get a student Advanced Standing--as will the French Baccalaur</p>
<p>I don't seem to be able to finish my post! The gist is that the net effect of preparing students for Oxbridge is to be preparing them for advanced standing at US universities since A-levels, required for admissions into British universities, qualify a student for advanced standing here.</p>
<p>Giving advanced standing for A levels is not universal.</p>
<p>Because it's the university I'm most familiar with, I looked up the credit policy for A levels on the Cornell University Web site. Cornell gives automatic credit for only 7 of the many possible A level subjects and even then, sometimes only gives credit for a grade of A. The number of credits that a student can receive from A levels is not particularly high (especially given that most British students have only three A levels). Kids with a lot of APs could actually do better than a British kid with 3 A levels in terms of credits (but Cornell limits the number of such credits that can be applied to a degree anyhow). <a href="http://www.cals.cornell.edu/cals/current/registrar/current-students/upload/adv_placement_intl_credentials.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.cals.cornell.edu/cals/current/registrar/current-students/upload/adv_placement_intl_credentials.pdf</a></p>
<p>I suspect that other selective colleges may have similar policies.</p>
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For example, rumor has it that on one recent AP test, the comic strip involved a shopping cart. Those students who could not remember the Spanish word for "shopping cart" were screwed.
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<p>I doubt they were screwed, and I bet they could've got a 5 on the oral part of the exam even without knowing that word... how many points can they possibly take away for not knowing 1 vocab word?</p>
<p>It's not the fact that they didn't know one word, soccerguy. It's the fact that their inability to use this word would have made the formulation of their oral response much more difficult. The students had to describe what was happening in each panel of the comic strip -- essentially, they had to tell the story of the comic strip. To tell a story about a shopping cart without ever saying "shopping cart" is extremely challenging. It requires all sorts of verbal contortions (even if you try to do it in English). The resulting explanation would likely not be anywhere near as good as the explanations produced by students who were lucky enough to remember the vocabulary word. My daughter and her classmates were given opportunities to practice producing oral responses to old AP test material prompts in class before the exam. On those occasions when students lacked essential vocabulary, they stumbled and fumbled and earned much lower scores than they did on those occasions when they were confident of the necessary vocabulary. I assume that the same thing would have happened on the real test.</p>
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I still believe a full IB is as intense as it comes, but it appears that it is a rarity for a student to accomplish this--did not know about levels and partials.
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<p>Not sure about that. It seems like some IB programs mandate that you do diploma...these are the smaller programs where it's like a magnet and you have to apply to them. Usually you have to do diploma. Now in counties or schools where some schools are IB and some are AP, or if both are offered, you usually can choose to do diploma or just take certificates. However it seems diploma numbers are on the rise at my school. We have the biggest diploma class ever. With less than 300 kids in the class, about 80 are diploma candidates. I think this relates to the fact that you have to be a diploma candidate in order to be looked at as having the most demanding schedule at your school. When W&M and UVa visited, they basically outright said this, although they accept people who aren't diploma candidates, but they have to be stronger in terms of grades, EC interest, or have a reason they didn't do diploma (scheduling conflict with a class like orchestra, etc).</p>
<p>Marian:</p>
<p>There's nothing universal about giving credit to APs, IBs, A-levels, etc... My S's LAC allowed only 2 AP credits to be used, and only to place out of distribution requirements (provided that a student obtain a B or better in an upper-level course in that discipline). Nor are all APs created equal as far as many colleges are concerned. Some get no credit at all. It is always crucial to consult individual colleges' policies on this issue. And finally, only certain scores are recognized (only 5s at Harvard). The treatment of A levels is no different.</p>
<p>At my school, if you do IB you are required to do the full diploma program. Simply doing certificate is not permitted.</p>