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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In our experience, IB has been great for a strong but shy student who appreciates the social experience of navigating high school in a tight-knit, readymade peer group, the closest experience in public school to a private school. Yes, the 6-course pack is something of a drag. We roll with it because it comes with a group of peers taking most of the same fairly rigorous classes for four years. In a giant public high school, you can't put a price on an IB peer group. These are teens who accrue the benefit of both social and academic inputs. Rather than denigrate IB like the poster above, it pays to think more broadly about what the program offers students who are a particularly good fit for it. Fact is, no shortage of those "middle of the road" IBD grads at Ivies, top tech programs and all manner of elite universities around the world.

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So now the strength of the IB program is the peer group? That’s very dependent on the school cohort, go to a magnet if that’s what you care for. [b]There’s self selection in AP classes too.[/b]

Please with the “Ivy admission”. It happens at RMIB for a handful of the 100 admitted students, that are part of the magnet (strong peer cohort) and have access to different coursework.

That’s not representative of the typical IB program. In fact for students relying [b]exclusively[/b] on IB don’t do “ivy” in admissions, just on par with the students taking 4-5 AP’s and I’m not looking down on these outcomes.

It’s not denigration to point the shortcomings of IB to prospective students and their parents.[/quote]

Nonsense, you've latched onto the wrong shortcomings.

It's no brainer that self-selection in AP classes doesn't promote peer interaction, or robust esprit de corps, like IBD does. Why not?  Because most MCPS high schools are A) very large, and B) teaching up to 30 AP courses. Moreover, the AP peer group in any particular MCPS high school is invariably bigger than the IBD group, as much as six times bigger. The result is that AP students are sprinkled around courses. Thus, IBD students are far more likely to overlap with one another in class moving up the chain.

Have you ever worked on an Ivy admissions committee? The Ivy where I once worked in admissions admitted many IBD grads from all over the country and all around the world. In fact, top government high schools abroad are often IB World Schools, particularly in China/Hong Kong, Canda, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.

Look, it's not a bad idea for ambitious IBD students in this country to double up on AP exams where there's significant content overlap, particularly for sciences, environmental studies, the arts and foreign languages. As noted several pages back, the timing of the IBD HL exams (June of senior year) is unhelpful vis a vis the US college admissions calendar.  It may also behoove an ambitious IBD student to take an AP or two, or a Cambridge Intl exam, they've self-prepped for to emphasize academic strengths. But to write-off the IB curriculum as inadequate as compared to AP for admission to the most highly competitive colleges in this country is to throw the baby out with the bath water as an exercise in America First thinking.

Believe it or not, particularly able, industrious and resourceful IBD students from government schools in this country, and many others, crack Ivies, or at least the one where I worked.  [/quote]

IB curriculum is inadequate at least in math and sciences. It’s a combination of high school  and college topics, and because of that take twice as kind as the equivalent AP class and usually receive less college credit.

If you need to supplement IB with AP classes to be competitive, it follows that IB isn’t that great, especially if you need to double up on equivalent classes.

Esprit de corps and peer interaction is more along the lines of pretentious and vacuous talk IB is famous for, personally I think the “global citizen” is the best.

And no you didn’t work as admissions officer at no ivy, you’re just making that up to give some cred to your post.[/quote]

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