Things you’ll only know if you studied the IB

The favourite pastime of every student who studied the International Baccalaureate was to complain about studying it. It required more studying, compulsory extra-curricular activities, and your mates who did A-level seemed to do next to no work in comparison. The pain of all the extra work was soothed by constantly lauding it over everyone else that what you were studying was harder, stretching the truth of how much work you were actually doing, assuming an air of superiority that was definitely undeserved. The bottom line is that no-one understands the International Baccalaureate student.

You were forced to study subjects you hated

In order to get the “broad yet in-depth education” that you signed up for, you had to study subjects you didn’t enjoy. More Maths, more Biology, more foreign languages. You thought you had finished with all that rubbish after finishing school. By signing up for the IB you had unwittingly subjected yourself to two more years of being tortured by isosceles triangles and verb conjugations. Well done you.

 

It was supposed to make it easier to get into university, but it didn’t

The grades that universities would ask you to get would be way higher than the equivalent in A level grades. Universities just didn’t understand the IB and penalised you for it.

The grading system was stupid

What sort of qualification is graded out of 45 overall, and out of seven per subject? On top of that, there were also three bonus points tagged on the end which were almost impossible to achieve.

You had to study so many more subjects than normal students

Three subjects, that must be so hard! Try studying SIX. Not including additional requirements such as Theory of Knowledge, CAS and your extended essay. Speaking of which…

Theory of Knowledge (TOK) was the biggest mindfuck ever

Studying philosophy is hard enough, but it’s only worth around 4% of the entire course. Despite this, you’re expected to get to grips with some complex philosophical ideas with only a couple of hours of teaching a week. Therefore it’s all a bit pointless, you don’t bother trying and when you get an E in your final essay it doesn’t impact your overall mark but it ruins your exam result sheet with the rest of your exemplary marks.

You thought your Extended Essay was going to change the world, it didn’t

You were allowed to do your Extended Essay on any subject of your choice. It was billed as the chance to get a taste for what university work will be like. You spent ages picking out a topic and a question that was going to be your chance to change the world with all of your groundbreaking insights as a spotty 18-year-old. In reality, you left it until the last minute and scraped a passing grade along with your dismal effort in the TOK essay.

CAS was such a waste of time

CAS stood for ‘Creative, Active, Service’, possibly the dullest acronym of all time. It was ridiculous that in order to get a qualification that would allow you into university, you had to endure 50 hours of community service, 50 hours of playing sport AND 50 hours of doing something creative. For the mathematically destitute, that’s a total of 150 hours of my life that I will never get my back. That would be true if any ever actually did their CAS and didn’t just make up that they went for a run or volunteered at their local charity shop. Basically, studying IB made you a terrible person who didn’t mind lying about helping people.

You never had any free periods

While everyone else was enjoying the luxury of free periods that sixth form life provided you, International Baccalaureate students suffered under the workload of a full-time table and compulsory extra-curricular activities. At least your academic record isn’t sullied with a film studies A-level though.

Everyone assumed that the IB was for people who weren’t smart enough to do A-levels

Just because they’d never heard of it, doesn’t mean it’s automatically less impressive. To be fair, it’s hard to explain that you aren’t an idiot despite signing up to do way more work than is required of you to get into university.

 

Only having exams at the end of the two years was great, but also terrifying

Everyone else had to sweat over multiple exam periods, AS levels, retakes of your AS levels, January A level module exams, but you didn’t. This meant that as long as you crammed for the months leading up to your final May exams, spending the rest of your time dossing around was easily doable.

When it came down to exam revision, it became a numbers game

Half the time that you were supposed to spend revising was spent totting up what you expected to get and debating whether your time was better spent making sure you had that level 6 in HL English nailed on or trying to rescue your SL Biology mark from a level 4 to a 5.

For the rest of your life, no-one will be impressed you did the IB

Before you started the IB, the young, innocent, unsuspecting version of yourself assumed that after you had suffered through two years of academic hardship everyone would hold you in the highest regard for what you had accomplished. Wrong. Everyone else that you end up at university with will have got there without doing nearly as much work as you have. What a waste of time.

Despite all the hard times, doing the IB has benefitted me in many ways. I managed to keep my options open before the dread of having to apply for university, spent 75% of my time getting by doing next to no work, and most importantly it made it impossible to compare who did better with friends who got amazing A-level results.