Anonymous wrote:Admissions decisions are about most rigorous course load. If IB is your schools most rigorous, then it helps. Not having it hurts.

Some colleges do prefer IB diploma kids and put a thumb on the scale. The UC school system, Swarthmore, Chicago.

Our school offers the IB diploma program for kids who want to go that route. It's an IB school and it's the most rigorous program offered there. All the smart and motivated students are taking it. Even though there are AP classes, there's just not as many as a non-IB school. To me, not doing the IB diploma at our school would be seen as a negative thing.

Admissions decisions are about most rigorous course load. If IB is your schools most rigorous, then it helps. Not having it hurts.

Some colleges do prefer IB diploma kids and put a thumb on the scale. The UC school system, Swarthmore, Chicago.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Face it, IB isn’t really intended to position kids ideally for admission to colleges and universities in the U.S. Good for European kids who take a gap year before attending some university in France or Switzerland.

People from my IB class only got into schools like Princeton, Yale, UPenn, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Wash U, UMD.

Kids from our AP school get into all these schools as well as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.

I don’t think the full IB is going to make or break college admissions. So long as the kid takes a challenging curriculum. But it will show a capacity to work hard and hone his writing even more.

When I was wondering whether it mattered that a kid was refusing to do IB, I compared admissions info overall and for IB. At my kids' school, if only one kid from a class got into a university, it was a kid who'd done the full IB diploma.

But I don't know if that means the IB diploma tipped the scales or if kids who do the diploma are just the highest achievers anyway. Kids from schools without an IB program get into HYP/WAS, after all.

My kid who did IB is definitely the best writer, though

full IB diploma shaves a year off of McGill.

I dont think IB is worth it beyond a couple rare exceptions - and McGill is one of them!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You can google IB acceptance rates at American Colleges… interesting results…. Here is one:
https://www.sbac.edu/cms/lib/FL02219191/Centricity/ModuleInstance/18035/IB%20Acceptance%20Rates%20at%20American%20Schools.pdf

What year is that?

It can’t be recent… it shows UVA’s overall acceptance rate as 39%.