Reply to What are my child's chances of getting into the IB program?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]For everyone quibbling about the math courses in the different schools offering the IB diploma - take a moment and recognize that there is flexibility within the two-year IB courses for the order and grouping of topics, as long as the overall course outcomes are met.

https://www.ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/curriculum/mathematics/ - scroll down to see the subject briefs with topics and hours for each of the two courses offered:
- Mathematics: analysis and approaches SL & HL
- Mathematics: applications and interpretation SL & HL

Every school offering the IB Diploma has to offer at least one of these courses to test in 12th grade. Depending on the school and the number of students, there are variations in which courses are offered and what testing level. So yes, in this way the programs can differ.

But even for schools offering both courses at both SL & HL level, they could have different ways of breaking up the content over two years and have different scheduling plans to offer combined courses with the general student population. This is just a difference in experience, not actual content of the course. RM specifically groups the content for the Analysis HL course to have one year be the same as AP BC Calculus, which is open to all students for scheduling purposes. The remainder of the HL content is in year-2 of the sequence. Just because the 11th grade course isn't specifically labeled as an IB course doesn't mean it isn't part of the 2-year course content.[/quote]

RMIB consistently has the cohort to take that approach.  B-CC may also routinely have such a cohort.

Not all of the other schools do each year, and a standout student (without a similarly able/interested cohort) at these schools may then find that the most rigorous IB coursework (e.g., that covering Analysis HL) is not available to them.[/quote]

Before you start darkly alluding to some students at some IB schools in MCPS not having IB classes available to them, maybe you should look at what classes are available at the IB schools in MCPS.

Also, are you saying that IB classes at RM are NOT open to all students?[/quote]

I made no statement about IB course accessibility to RM students outside the IB magnet program.

My "dark allusion" is not that, at all.  It was, pretty much, a forthright statement, and appears well supported.

Take a look at the 24-25 catalogs for the schools (selecting schools and then thr Mathematics department, in this case):

https://coursebulletin.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/SchoolCourseCatalogs/Index/All

Pretty much all offer up to AP Calc BC & AP Stats.

Some offer MV Calc/Diff Eq (not Einstein, Seneca Valley or Kennedy; RM, Springbrook, Watkins Milll & B-CC have it).

Fewer offer Linear Algebra, and none of the IB schools (Blair, Poolesville & Churchill; maybe others, but not B-CC, Whitman, Johnson or Wooton, which I checked just for the usual claims about "W" schools that enter these discussions).

Blair and Churchill (? interesting, but not entirely surprising), but not Poolesville (surprising, as it's the Blair-type SMaCS magnet for upper county), offer Complex Analysis.

Only Blair offers Discrete Math.

The last three post- AP Calc, college-level courses are not IB-related, but included for information generally relevant to discussion of differential course availability.

Only 3 IB schools even list an IB-specific math course (IB Precalc is offered at Einstein, Kennedy & RM).  It looks like only RM offers IB Analysis at all (description looks to be less advanced than the APs/college-level courses, but that could be decieving).  Could that be because other IB schools suggest a different set of courses (i.e., within more standard MCPS offerings, such as Honors Precalc & AP Calc) to achieve readiness for the IB exam?  Could it be that IB courses are withheld from the course catalog at some schools?  Perhaps, but these beg the question of whether these MCPS schools are all providing a reasonable equivalence, offering roughly the same experience/opportunity to IB enrollees acrpss the county.  I think the anecdotal evidence pretty clearly points to "no".

As usual, MCPS offers different things at different schools, claiming to meet community demand, but only when there is a cohort (and probably vocally demanding families), leaving a student with need/interest but without a cohort with the option of maybe taking a course at Montgomery College (with the difficult logistics, there) or moving to a different pyramid (even more difficult).

And, as usual, they make this fact clear as mud -- they don't want to have to address (or even acknowledge) catchment-based academic inequity.[/quote]

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