<p>Has anyone here moved from a non-IB school with AP and Honors classes to a school that offers the IB? If so, how is the transition?</p>
<p>It’s not that hard, IB classes are basically AP Classes, but you have to do an Internal Assessment. SL classes are easier than AP and HL are the same as AP.</p>
<p>I took mostly honors and AP in ninth and tenth grade before going into the IBDP, and here’s the gist of it:</p>
<p>IB is more than college-level courses, and there’s no picking-and-choosing your subjects. It’s all or nothing, and that includes things like the orals for your language courses; the IAs for math, history, and science; CAS hours; and the EE. You have to learn to balance your time in a way you haven’t before, because you have more things calling for your attention that don’t necessarily take place in the classroom. There’s a lot more to receiving an IB diploma than your grades.</p>
<p>But, no, once you get past that, it’s not horrifically difficult. You’re probably going to end up writing more, so get used to that. You just have to learn to manage time and not procrastinate. That’s what my classmates and I struggle with most.</p>
<p>Personally I think it seriously depends. I took 4 APs as part of my IB schedule (so while I was in IB English, for example, I took AP Lit). I considered my IB exams to be much harder than the AP ones, even for my SLs. The AP exams seemed to cover things that I had sort of been collecting in my mind for a while. So while I struggled immensely to comment on random prose on the SL English exam, I whipped up an essay about Great Expectations easily on the AP. They are just completely different exams. I know other people who were the opposite, because they were more comfortable with the IB exam format.</p>
<p>In terms of the classes, it’s the same as with any class. Some teachers make it easy, some don’t. My AP Stat class and exam was the easiest class I took in high school, but SL French made me miserable with all of the oral presentations. Yet I failed (yup, I’ll be honest, I totally failed) the Physics AP exam because I was naive enough to think my IB class would prepare me for the AP exam. Again- totally different exams.</p>
<p>But I second the time management requirement. Don’t be like 90%+ of students who attempt to write their EE in a week. Or three days, like I did…</p>
<p>Three days?! Yikes. My coordinator won’t even let us do that - she has a structured timeline set up to prevent it, because we had someone a few years ago write it in one night…</p>
<p>Ha. I’d like to see them try to keep me on a timeline.</p>
<p>It was a pretty well established fact that anytime a teacher (or in college, a professor) says “Do NOT try to do this in one time, you WILL NOT be able to”… it’s merely a challenge…</p>