<p>I currently attend an okay public school. however, due to many negative things, I have decieded to make a switch, and attend a new school for my sophomore year. I will either attend a top public school in town with IB(top 50 in the nation), or a smaller, catholic prep school. Many of the kids from the top public school are going to ivies and other top schools. Only a handfull of kids from the catholic school attend ivies, but many attend excellent schools. I was wondering which one do you think would be better to attend if I wanted to go to Oxbridge, LSE, Imperial, etc..
I hear that these schools like to have applicants with lots of APs, and the catholic school has a few, but many of the classes are very difficult. I would take 2-3 AP's junior year and 2-3 AP's senior year..but I would probably get high scores on them due to the excellent academics of the catholic school.
I personally consider the catholic school to be a "mini oxford", with the uniforms and the atmosphere. However, I doubt that the admssions officers at the UK schools would realize this atmosphere. But I thought that may help a little..
So, beyond social reasons, which school do you think I should go to? The catholic school or the Public school with possibly a full IB diploma?</p>
<p>This is also somewhat urgent, as I need to make my decision before school ends in the next week or so! </p>
<p>=(</p>
<p>I think you're chances would be best if you do the IB.
(but I've absolutely no experience with American high schools / UK admission, etc.)</p>
<p>I doubt that an oxfordish high school would give you an advantage in the admission process.</p>
<p>I<code>ve gotten offers from places like Imperial, LSE, UCL, Kings, Warwick this year and I did the IB (didn</code>t get into Cambrdige :( ) . I did full IB but I don<code>t live in the US. From my experience, IB is highly regarded in terms of UK admissions so I</code>d recommend you go to an IB school. Oxbrdige/LSE/Imperial do not care about what kind of HS you attended(or the atmosphere of your school)- they only look for predcited scores, either in IB, A-levels, or AP. For your application, you only send in a personal statement along with your predcited scores. </p>
<p>I think UK schools are more acquainted with IB than AP so I would go for IB if I were you. However, this is granted that the school does a good job in the IB program as you have to meet the conditional offer (for example, 38 out of 45 pts on the diploma).</p>
<p>Both IB and a hard AP schedule will serve you well, but in terms of applicant numbers, the top unis have more IB condidates than AP, thus they are more familiar with it, and this may well work in your favour.
However, UK universities do have a slight problem with setting quite hard 'offers' (i.e. the grades you need to get after they have offered you a place to actually get in), for oxbridge 776 at HL is fairly common, which many of my IB friends moan is quite a bit of pressure.
The top unis do look to see how good your school is, and in a similar way to AA in the US, will make allowances to how bad your schools is, but seeing as both the schools seem pretty academic I wouldn't worry about this.
Have a look at the classes most applicable to the subject you are applying for, as if you apply for physics, they will care about your math and science classes much more than english.</p>
<p>I don't know that much about APs and high school in general, so I'm not going to comment on it.
I think in terms of which program is best if you want to apply to UK universities, IB > A-levels. I say this because of the new tariff system for IB students. Only this year, I got a 32 IB points offer in a program that requires AAA from A-level students (but it won't be that easy at Oxbridge). But you shouldn't join the IB just because you feel like it would benefit you more. You should be interested in the program and make sure it's the right thing for you.</p>
<p>I think that if you're a strong academically student, they will want you regardless of what program you've been in!</p>