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[quote=Anonymous]Ugh, Jeff, I always manage to quit out of my mobile posts before I submit them.

Ok, so I want to preface this with two statements:

1.  My background is in higher education/curriculum development
2. I am a former College Board employee

That said, I think both programs are great, but if I had to choose between the two for myself or my own child, I'd go with IB.  Here is why: IB places more of an emphasis on two things that are valued in a university setting and too few kids are prepared to do at the college level.

1.  Long form critical analysis/writing.
2.  Interdisciplinary work.

In the last twenty years or so, the CEEB has made a significant effort to maintain its stranglehold on the AP brand (AP, not SAT, is where they make their money BTW).  Part of that is what they call the AP Course Audit, which means that, in order for a school to brand a course as "AP," the syllabus [i]has to be approved by the CEEB[/i].

The marketing spin on this is actually pretty impressive, because ultimately a kid's score on the AP exam is all that matters to an institution, and the student's actual learning can't be measured -- only their ability to meet the constraints of the test.

So my concern about the AP program is the increasing effort to teach the humanities courses to the grading methodologies of the exams, which are very much based on the old five sentence paragraph with an intro sentence, blah blah, and the .way that the curriculum doesn't really support interdisciplinary work, which I personally believe is very important.  But YMMV.  Anecdotally,  I have a number of friends and family members who are seeing students come into excellent universities and colleges with great credentials and a number of AP credits, who just aren't prepared for the caliber of critical writing, despite their high school work on the AP level.

In the long run, it's a matter of what's best for your kid -- only you can know that.  And on the part of FCPS, it was quite brilliant to put IB into the "lower performing" pyramids (which is really relative when you're in the top school systems in the country) schools, to draw more non-FARMs families and to add more socio-economic diversity to the schools.  And in the case of pyramids like Annandale and South Lakes, which are pretty diverse, it was a great way to retain upper-middle class kids and the IDCP provided kids who were not college bound with a lot of options.

One last thing: I grew up with a lot of kids who went to WIS because they were European diplomat's kids.  They needed the IBDP to go to university in their home countries.  I think things are a lot more flexible now, but the IB diploma definitely has its place in that regard, and no one can argue the strength of the program at Richard Montgomery.[/quote]

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