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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One thing I don’t like about writing in IB is it’s emphasis on volume. All assignments come with a word count requirement, which creates an incentive for a verbose if not rambling style of writing.

AP courses have a more varied style and tend put more emphasis on structure. IB writing is more of a one size fits all, with a lot of writing but very similar approach and content. You get the obligatory “what do we know and how do we know it”, “it could be this because of that, or an alternative because of something else”. To some this passes as “analytical writing”, but it doesn’t always work. Its great for a major in medieval French comparative literature, it falls short for a lab report or economics paper. Because of all this you see IB papers on math and science with atrocious first person narrative stylistic choices. For what is worth a lab report in AP chemistry will look like a lab report with proper organization and concise and to the point style.

Most of the writing style in college is actually closer to AP than IB. [/quote]

People talk about writing writing writing. Talk about other aspects of IB. For example, write about how AP Bio is compared to IB Bio. AP Bio is double period so labs are done in one of the periods. Is it too much info crammed into one year? IB Bio is over two years so are labs spread out, or is there a dedicated day each week for labs, or does it vary? How about level of difficulty in AP versus IB? All the threads on IB only seem to talk about the writing. Ok most readers get it, there's "more" writing and writing is "different" in AP. [/quote]

People always bring up how good IB is in writing, look up thread. Personally I think writing in IB is one of the most overrated aspects.

I’d summarize it as quantity over quality and one size fits all.

Internal assessments in math and sciences are are some of the worst. Do you need to write 20 pages document as part of your math assessment? Sorry but no, it might be useful in English and history, not in math and sciences. These are busy work time sinks pretentiously called “analytical writing” and “research”, while the fundamentals aren’t even covered properly.

Far more useful is to teach how to write a one page mathematical proof and a lab report instead of rambling over pages after pages. That’s not good preparation for college![/quote]
lol.. kind of.. but the point of IB is to think critically, reflect, and write analytical papers.

As I stated up thread, a lot of the RMIB magnet kids I know are actually STEM majors now in college.  They can churn out high quality papers very quickly in college. At least IB taught them that, if nothing else.[/quote]

I guess quantity over quality is better than nothing.

There is demand for writing intensive classes, guess the AP class with highest growth? AP seminar with a whopping 30% year over year growth, which can also be substituted for 10th grade English. It’s in track to overtake the number of IB diploma candidates this year.

In our neck of the woods only the Catholic high school offers Seminar and research, I hope it will change in the future. [/quote]

Not correct. Last year, more than 10 MCPS HS offered the English 10 version of AP Seminar.[/quote]

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