Hi, I was accepted SCEA and I’m an international student who went through IGCSEs and is now doing IB. I completely understand the whole ‘only board exams matter’ sentiment. My school sends people to the UK where the only things that count are IGCSEs/predicted grades, and they treat internal grades like they don’t matter. My teacher literally once told our class “just fail your tests and focus on your IA (internal assessments which take up 20% of our final IB grade)”. So my school does this thing where they make the tests 1000x more difficult than the actual thing to prepare us for the exams. I got straight Bs my freshman and sophomore year (still top 10% of my class), but 10A*s/As for my actual IGCSE grade. And my junior year (IB first year) I had a few 5s. I think what really made a difference was my guidance counselor’s report, where he explained this whole situation, and the strengths of the rest of my application. I also think that they compare you to the people in your class; in my case, my school sent them grade distributions so they could see what was a ‘top’ grade. TL;DR, don’t lose hope, imo they adopt a pretty holistic approach. GOOD LUCK (: