I am currently a senior in HS. I’m already a semester into the school year and am only 5 months away from graduation. But I am facing a major problem. I finally realized that IB is not for me.
Joining IB was never my main concern. I actually never thought I’d join until the very last day that I could sign up. A lot of my peers and teachers pushed me to join. All of my friends really wanted to have the IB diploma. So I did it. I signed up for what could possibly be my biggest high school regret.
My school is quite inexperienced with IB, and most of the teachers are very new to the program. My school is also not the best school in the world because I have changed teachers half-way through the year multiple times. This really hurt my path in IB, and put a lot of strain on me than it should. Students in the IB program are constantly set back due to the teacher switching, and the lack of experience in the teachers lead to big piles of work being dumped on us in the very last minutes. I’ve never been good at time management, and dealing with all of this has made me extremely depressed and stressed out.
I’ve applied to colleges already, but I am 100% sure that I am going to community college first due to personal reasons. Knowing this, I feel like IB is becoming more and more useless to me as time goes on, and is only harming my health instead of helping me in any way.
It’s too late now for me to change my classes, but I plan on cutting TOK, CAS, and EE out of my schedule completely and just take my IB classes without them. Is that a wise decision to make? I’ve had many teachers tell me that I should stick with it till the end, but I am really starting to lose hope here. What do you guys suggest I should do?
Do you have a sense of what your total score will be if you continue? Did you do well on the SL exams in your junior year? If the answer is below passing for the diploma (–I don’t recall what that is), there’s no point anyway.
I did not have SL exams in my junior year, all of the exams will be taken this May. I do have my predicted grades, and I currently have mostly 6’s with one 5. But my CAS and EE are really far behind.
You sound truly unhappy, and only you know if you can motivate yourself to do well and finish the diploma. I would recommend finishing it if you can do it. The reason I say that is that many colleges will give you a full year of credit for the diploma, whereas they won’t give you credit for SL exams (even though some are at the same level as the AP exams), and they’ll often only give you credit for HL exams with a 6 or 7. Depending on your plans, the diploma could save you time and money. (You could even do a gap year if you’re feeling so burnt out.) I don’t want to suggest that I’m advocating for completing college in 3 years, but this is an option you’re giving up. I know that for some students embarking on a path that requires many years of schooling, they see the IB diploma as a way to “get one year free”, particularly if it relieves them of requirements unrelated to their major.
If you’re already registered as a diploma candidate, there are costs to switching to the certificate program. This shouldn’t be a driver of the decision, but I don’t know your situation and you should check this with your program coordinator.