IB program and college admissions?
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Anonymous
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Interesting. A Brown frosh I know was told flat out that none of her AP courses, regardless of AP exam scores, would be granted college credit, but she's not in the engineering school. I do understand this is for placement, not credit, and see the difference.
Perhaps I'm now off topic for this thread. I am interested in other's college app experiences and stories WRT IB programs. Thanks, all. |
Anonymous
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PP--that should be "would NOT be granted credit."
Of course, her pile of AP courses are part of what got her into Brown. |
Anonymous
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I think the key thing colleges are looking for is the rigor of your high school program, that is, did you take the most challenging courses on offer. This could be from IB or AP. I agree that colleges look "favorably" on the IB diploma - I think that's hard to argue. The real question would be, do they look more or less favorably on IB vs. lots of APs, or do they view them about the same. My guess is they view them about the same - IB teaches great writing, but you only have the grades (which could vary by teacher and school) until you take the final tests. I agree with PP that APs can be used to skip 101-level courses and move straight into Music Theory 201 or whatever, but they cannot be used for credit. Also, not all AP results can be used for credits in certain subjecs. Like PP, we think probably the main benefit of the APs was to get DD into the ivy, because they aren't a lot of use now that she's there. |
Anonymous
I wonder if an IB-based transcript might into some of the same issues the AP-based transcript runs into: wide variation in how hard it is to earn an "A" from one school to another, even from one teacher to another. In Montgomery County, for example, a range of high schools offer IBs, but RM is known to be the most rigorous. I understand that the IB curriculum is standard and IB teachers get training--but the value of an "A" still depends on the teaching talent and grading rigor in individual schools. With AP, colleges can get an idea about whether that "A" at Slacker High really means anything if the AP test result was a 2. With IB, the playing field levels with the test results, but those come in at the end of high school. |
Anonymous
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Although there will alway be a certain level of difference with regard to teacher's scoring - the same can be said for all courses (AP as well), the IB program has rather strict guidelines/rubrics for each grade level (7 is the highest, with a 3+ failing) and it is hard for a teacher to bypass those guidelines. In addition, the kids are required to do projects throughout the program (world lit papers, science labs, etc) that are called IA's that are sent to the IB Organization for grading. Also, there are regular training courses that teachers must take in order to teach an IB course. With this oversight in place it makes it a bit difficult for teachers to give an easy grade. They won't last long before being told that they need to grade more appropriately. The bigger issue is whether a teacher is qualified to teach the material so that the kids are able to do the projects (papers, etc) that are required.
Also, I think it's absolutely correct that colleges/universities are looking for students who are in the most rigorous academic program that is available to them. In all of the university info sessions we have been to the admissions counselors highlighted the importance of students challenging themselves - take the most AP classes you are able to, enroll in the IB. Whatever is best at your particular school. If, however, your school offers 20 AP classes and the student only took 2 of them that would not be looked upon favorably - they would rather see a student who took as many and as varied a list of AP classes. College counselors have indicated to me that looking favorably on the IB diploma is because the student is required to take a full range of classes which covers all subject areas, whereas the AP doesn't have those requirements - students pick them and often only pick the ones they will do well in. In other words, if your child is in an AP program just make sure they are taking a wide range of courses and truly challenging themselves. |
Anonymous
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Interesting thread. What I find intriguing about the IB program (and I am learning more about it now) is that it requires much more writing than an AP program. AP classes are individual. (Ex. AP bio but maybe not AP English since at DS school you have to have both the grades to get into the class and approval from the teacher which is granted only after a one on one meeting). AP calc doesn't require the level of writing that AP English does, although it does require some.
My understanding is that TOK requires quite a bit of writing just by itself so that students in IB all along become much stronger writers throughout the program even if they do not get the diploma and colleges both know and prefer that. Again, this is just my understanding. I'm new to all of this and am happy to be corrected if I have it wrong. |
Anonymous
I just found this out myself, but I only know that NYU does it. I couldn't tell you what other schools do it, but have been told there are others. With more and more schools having the IB program other universities will probably start doing this. |
Anonymous
You're absolutely correct that the IB program has a TON of writing in all of its classes. The math classes may not have as much, but it does have some (they have to do a large math portfolio which requires both calculations, analysis, etc. so there is writing involved). My DD is in Art HL and probably 40% of her work is writing...TOK does have a fair amount of writing, but so do the science classes. Colleges do know this about the IB and know the kids will come to school prepared to write at the level they will need to in order to do well in college. In addition to the writing which I think is great is the requirement for oral presentations in each class - again, in every class and the time requirement is usually about 20 minutes, which includes both their presentation and a Q&A by the teacher and class which means they need to know their stuff in order to answer questions. It's great preparation for the kids! I wish I had been forced to do more presentations in high school because I used to dread (and sometimes avoid) college classes that had presentation requirements. Not surprisingly, I'm still a terrible public speaker to this day - pathetic, I know... |
Anonymous
The colleges and the kids all know which AP's are easier (think AP Environmental Sciences, aka APES, or AP Psychology) and which are killers (think AP Bio and other sciences, AP Calc BC and, surprisingly, AP Music). So if you're thinking of applying to a highly selective college, it won't do you much good to load up on APES and AP Calc AB and the like. AP Lit and AP English involve a fair amount of writing. In DC's class they wrote timed essays in class once a week - say 15 or 30 minutes on a work they were reading. There were also some longer projects. I believe this was done as preparation for the AP test. If you're taking 3-4 APs in a school year, you pretty much have to diversify in order to take that many APs. At DC's competitive MoCo high school, the kids applying to selective colleges generally had 7-9 APs. I hear it's less at private schools, in some cases because the school just doesn't offer that many APs, in other cases because the school doesn't want to teach an AP curriculum. |
Anonymous
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Here's an interesting data table, though I don't see the year on it.
It looks like the complete IB program, diploma earned, is an advantage at a number of SLACs . Especially some of the better midwestern ones like Carleton and Oberlin. Minute help at schools accepting less than 20% of applicants. Significant help * at better state universities like UMD, UVA,, etc. * By "help" I mean the program is recognized as turning out reliably capable students. Again, I don't know the year for this data. http://dasd-sharepoint.dasd.org/Schools/STEMAcademy/Documents/IB_University_Acceptance_Rates.pdf |
Anonymous
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Here's another for data geeks.
http://www.ibo.org/iba/commoncore/documents/GlobalDPDestinationSurveyUS.pdf |
Anonymous
| Ivies (and some others) do not accept HS AP/IB courses for college credit. |
Anonymous
| The point here is not whether they are accepted for college credit. See several posts above. The question is how the IB program is viewed from admissions offices, especially as compared with the better known AP courses. It seems, that a kid will do OK WRT college admissions in an IB program if they do the complete diploma program...if that's the right fit for the kid. |
Anonymous
Again, I think that for OP, the issue is probably whether IB is more or less helpful than a slate of APs, which is the alternative she probably faces. I'm going to take guess here, that both IB and AP are evidence of solid performance, and thus both will confer some kind of advantage on applicants. |
Anonymous
| How did this year's RM class do with college admissions? |