Reply to Practical differences between AP and IB in FCPS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There have been years where some of the top AP schools like Langley, McLean, and Oakton each had as many National Merit Semifinalists as all eight of the IB schools in the county combined. [/quote]

Selection effect, nitwit. Correlation not causation.[/quote]

If IB were all that, the higher SES communities would by now have demanded it for their schools. They do not want it, whether it’s Langley in FCPS or Whitman in MCPS.  That is far more compelling evidence than the typical, biased pro-IB anecdotes invariably offered on these threads.  [/quote]

You suggest the high-SES communities must know best. They aren't exactly experts in the field of education. The average parent simply knows that within FCPS, most AP schools have good GreatSchools ratings and most IB schools have poor GreatSchools ratings.
Few outsider parents know any real details about IB. It's always the same, incorrect, critiques repeated ad infinitum: perceived inflexibility, too much reading and writing (Writing for math and science? Ridiculous!), and less college credit (no credit for SL, credit for HL).[/quote]

Different poster, I think the PP has a point about the high SES demographics choosing AP over IB.

In my experience the IB cheerleaders are far less sophisticated about education and are easily swayed by the smoke and mirrors of the marketing materials, like “critical thinking”, “problem solving”, “global citizen”, IB will get your kid in an ivy etc.

People that actually have developed critical thinking, will look in the course catalogue and discover with dismay that the low tier IB schools have a slim course offering consisting of SL Math and HL Biology. Next level of critical thinking is to go through the syllabus and see that the IB classes in math and sciences are clearly inferior to the AP.

You can also compare writing intensive AP classes as English and History, with IB. I don’t see the latter coming on top. Often you hear about the IB extended essay, a 4000 page write up as the pinnacle of writing in IB. For comparison AP English exam you need to write three different essays, for a 5 it’s typical to write a total 2000 words and that’s timed free response questions in about two hours. It’s similar for AP History.

Very popular with the IB cheer squad is to make the argument from authority, exemplified in this thread by the supposed college English professor, or some other variants like the admission officer giving a solid tip that they “love” IB candidates, or the child that swore they “were well prepared for college” or that found “college work easy by comparison”., or some meaningless moronic snippets like “AP teaches to the test, regurgitates material, is just memorization”, “IB teaches you how to think, AP teaches what to think”. Very few professionals would take these arguments seriously so yes, SES demographics matter because these people on average have a better and finer tuned bs detector.[/quote]

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