I recently just ended my Junior year (1st year of IB). I have been debating between continuing on the diploma path or just switching to certificate. Although I did fairly well in all my IB classes (5/6 classes were IB - all A’s and B’s), I don’t know if I want to continue with the stress of ToK, CAS, and the EE on top of all the homework and internal assessments. I am supposed to test for all 6 classes at the end of my senior year. I don’t believe I am prepared for them and would rather only test in the subjects I am most confident about. I was wanting to know if it was possible to switch to certificate whilst still taking ALL IB classes or would I be kicked out from the classes I am not testing in.
That will depend on your school, not on the program. Talk to your IB Coordinator. At our school, most courses were available to non-IBD students, but TOK had an IBD version and a non-IBD version. Did you take the SL exams this year or are you assuming you’ll get 5 and 6?
If you switch and have paid the IBD fee, you will pay again to test for the certificate (unless this has changed in the last year.)
But no, there is no reason you can’t switch. Many kids at our school do for a myriad of reasons.
Why would you continue to take IB classes if you are dropping the IBD? You just continue to take the iB HL classes that you want, and switch out for the rest. If that means AP or honors or standard, is whatever your school does. Make sure that this won’t hurt you for local regents if that is a thing. You want to have this shored up for application time. I think it is fairly common to drop the IBD, I wouldn’t call it a switch though.