6 Reasons to NOT do the IB
The IB is designed to shape you into a very well rounded, cultured, hard-working, student. To succeed, you need to sacrifice your sleep, your social life, and in extreme cases, even your GPA. For some students in certain scenarios, it could restrict them from attaining their goals, but which scenarios? Below are the top 10 reasons why you shouldn’t do the IB.
1. IB can prevent you from studying important subjects.
You are a straight-A scientific genius in the 10th grade. You don’t know whether you want to be an engineer or a doctor. Ideally, you should have the option of taking all HL (Higher Level) sciences. But since this is the IB, you can only pick a maximum of two sciences and you can’t take all the sciences you want. So will it be biology and chemistry or physics and chemistry? How do you choose your career in the 10th grade?
One of my friends decided to load up on IB courses but to not take the IB diploma program because he was moving to a place where they did not offer the IB for his final year of high school.
Rather, he studied HL biology, HL chemistry, and SL physics in order to get ahead of other students when he had to take those subjects in university.
2. IB can force you to take useless subjects.
As you know, there are 7 groups of subjects you must take: language and literature, foreign language, social science, physical science, maths, arts (thankfully, this can be replaced by science or social science), not to mention theory of knowledge, the extended essay, the CAS (creativity, activity, service).
Imagine you are still the straight-A student that wants to take three sciences or a humanities student who wants to learn history, business, and economics. Rather than studying the three sciences or social sciences, doing the IB will make you take two years of a social science or a foreign language or a science that will have no benefit to your career.
I remember, in my case, I studied economics. I enjoyed it and remain interested in the subject today! However, in hindsight, I probably should have studied physics to help me get ahead in college.
3. IB can reduce your GPA
Especially if your college admission depends on your GPA, you seriously want to consider this.
I was academically blessed in high school, I graduated as salutatorian of my class, praise be to God. I did the IB with 4 HLs: biology, math, chemistry, and economics and finished with a 36, not bad but not outright spectacular. My sister thought she could pull off the same thing. As arrogant as this sounds, she wasn’t me. She is struggling with her IB courses, especially HL biology, HL chemistry, and SL math! In her pursuit of her IB diploma, her GPA took a really really bad hit! So much so, that the colleges that she wanted to impress with her IB diploma might actually reject her because of her GPA! Rather than taking those courses to get the diploma, she should have dropped both of those down to SL to sacrifice the diploma but to get the A.
This is an unpopular opinion, but as important as it is to challenge yourself in high school, it’s even more important to get a high GPA, high SAT/ACT scores, good college essays, and great recommendation letters, for the sake of college.
4. IB courses are not recognized in some of the USA
Although more and more American universities are recognizing IB courses, there are a minority that do not. This is alarming and can have a very serious impact on your college experience!
For example, a friend of mine took HL biology in high school and wanted to skip biology in college. He had to attend a small community college because he was living with his family. However, that community college did not recognize IB course credit. As a result, he had to waste an extra year completing very easy courses in order to get his college credit!
If I were him, I would have taken the AP exams for those subjects after I took the IB courses rather than the IB exams to get college credit!
5. The IB diploma is practically useless in the USA
In most schools that offer IB, you can opt to take IB courses independent of the the diploma. I remember in our school, we used to call those students ‘half-IB students’.
Outside the USA, especially in Europe, in some universities, you can’t get into a university without one! Just like with the AP, you can cash in on your college courses credit, and that’s really helpful.
But you do not need to do the EE, TOK, and CAS that is associated with the diploma because American universities do not value the diploma in the admissions process greatly.
6. IB isn’t good for your health.
In high school, I was an over achiever, I did really well in school, and I do really well in college, thanks be to God. However to this day, I have never had such an academically rigorous time in my life, not even in college. I remember I never slept before midnight of every day of the last two weeks of April and all of May of my junior year.
Other kids applying outside the USA didn’t have to apply in fall of senior year (they had to apply after getting their actual scores which come out in July).
Having the IB course work along with 10 USA college applications really stressed me out. I gave up my social life, my sleep, and I became ill both physically and mentally. I had summer to recover from that but my the entire first semester of my senior year was a slightly more bearable version of that stretched over a longer period of time. It was maddening.
Comments
Post a Comment