International Baccalaureate (IB) candidate assessments are underway, which is part of the Diploma Programme (DP) curriculum available at Park. There are a number of requirements for a student to achieve the IB Diploma, including taking Theory of Knowledge (TOK), submitting an extended essay, and taking enough IB class courses. IB Diplomas are promoted as prestigious certificates that allow a high probability of entry into hundreds of universities that use the program.
I believe the IB program’s stringent requirements and mere promise of prestige aren’t enough to justify all the effort it takes to get one. High school students are already burdened with assignments and testing that don’t have to do with IB, and expecting students to press on through multiple IB courses at the potential jeopardy of their grades doesn’t feel academic. It feels as though the IB program punishes students who struggle to keep their grades up because once the student becomes ineligible for IB, the student still has to contend with their bad grade associated with a program that they can’t make use of.
The IB Diploma doesn’t actually guarantee academic success beyond high school, which is what it implicitly advertises to students. It is at the discretion of college admissions officials to accept applicants, and IB’s value is directly tied to its perception by colleges. It isn’t inconceivable that colleges, in the future, will place increasingly less importance on whether students have IB Diplomas during admissions, like they have with Honors and Advanced Placement (AP). Likely, if a student has completed IB, they will already have access to many high-value colleges based on the rest of their academic portfolio — considering the rigor needed for IB.
One problem I found was that Park does not communicate well about IB. While a brief explanation of IB is provided during course registration, it doesn’t lay out the requirements for IB. I, for one, didn’t even know what the purpose of IB was until a lecture in my English class junior year. I was also on track to be eligible for an IB Diploma until I failed one of the requirements by not taking the TOK course. Again, I was not informed of that condition for diploma eligibility. I can imagine that other schools that use the IB program might have similar issues communicating the nature of IB to students and parents alike.
Another concern I have about the IB Diploma is that it doesn’t have a particularly international character, despite being presented as such. Obtaining an IB Diploma doesn’t heavily incentivize moving abroad to study at a college in another country. Instead, many of the universities relevant to IB are located in the United States. The universities outside of the U.S. that use IB are mostly in Europe, which excludes many other places of learning in the world. According to IB’s website, they have 8,442 universities using IB around the world, 3,808 of which are in the Americas. Only 1,973 are in the region titled “Asia-Pacific,” around 1/8th of all IB schools. Over 2,661 exist in the remaining region, which does not differentiate between Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
The biggest issue I see with IB is that it doesn’t attempt to encourage students to be interested in international perspectives or language. Instead, it wants students to sacrifice much of their time in high school for a diploma that will become, if anything, supplementary to the rest of their portfolio. Students should not feel pressured to pursue it, especially since some will later learn that it’s too intensive and thus their overall grades will suffer. Particularly for freshmen, it shouldn’t be obsessed over or seen as an end goal of their high school duration.