For the record, I’m not convinced the IB Diploma Program is a good thing. It doesn’t really solve any of the problems with public schools, it shares the frustrating focus on standardized testing and password-guessing instead of real learning, etc.
I graduated from IB back in 2000 (with 43 out of 45 on my diploma), and I disagree here. The thing about IB’s tests (and the Extended Essay) is that they’re incredibly comprehensive. There’s just no way to do well on them except by actually learning the stuff.
My time was before the current era of standardized testing, but I’ve taken an AP test (AP Physics C: Mechanics; my IB program didn’t do physics), as well as the ACT, SAT (I and several IIs), and GRE. Unlike all of them, IB tests depend very strongly on both general intelligence (mostly the ability to write coherently) and subject-specific knowledge, and (importantly!) they don’t saturate at the high end. It’s quite difficult to get 7s on the tests, especially HL—I fought for four years for mine (and I still got two 6s in my weaker subjects).
Of course, it’s totally possible for an IB program to be implemented badly, and produce students who get really low scores and sometimes miss the diploma entirely. The tests would detect that, though. I was fortunate to have a good program in my public school, plus I had a really strong work ethic back then.
You’re right about ToK, though—it was basically useless.
From my perspective, the problem with the IB program is not its tests, but that it requires a fairly high level of understanding across every one of many subjects. It does not permit compensating for average ability at one subject with mastery of another, or even of every other one.
In this respect it is quite cookie-cutter: a renaissance person is good at everything and that is what is expected of IB students, but in the real world, it is possible to find vocations, even radically cross-disciplinary ones, that fall short of using every sub-category of skill.
Not everyone has to be able to apply economic models to biological systems undergoing transformations that differ over time in an original computer-program and write an essay on it worthy of winning a literature award and give a prize acceptance speech in French on how the philosophy of science has been previously limited by particular psychological roadblocks but the sociological function of winning this award will change that, once the musical written, directed, and starred-in by the genius to commemorate the occasion takes over Broadway.
I would have to disagree with you. I took both AP and IB tests in Economics and Spanish, and to me the IB test was more about the amount of stuff you could write down in the time limit than about understanding. Since the test questions are virtually the same from year to year, it is easy to study the test rather than the subject, and I certainly didn’t feel like preparing for the tests taught me anything in the anticipation-constraining sense. (I got a 7 on both, so I don’t think this is entirely attributable to incompetence)
That said, the IB program is definitely more rigorous and meaningful than a typical public school experience, and saying it isn’t up to the standards of LessWrong isn’t really a criticism. I don’t mean to be too harsh.
I graduated from IB back in 2000 (with 43 out of 45 on my diploma), and I disagree here. The thing about IB’s tests (and the Extended Essay) is that they’re incredibly comprehensive. There’s just no way to do well on them except by actually learning the stuff.
My time was before the current era of standardized testing, but I’ve taken an AP test (AP Physics C: Mechanics; my IB program didn’t do physics), as well as the ACT, SAT (I and several IIs), and GRE. Unlike all of them, IB tests depend very strongly on both general intelligence (mostly the ability to write coherently) and subject-specific knowledge, and (importantly!) they don’t saturate at the high end. It’s quite difficult to get 7s on the tests, especially HL—I fought for four years for mine (and I still got two 6s in my weaker subjects).
Of course, it’s totally possible for an IB program to be implemented badly, and produce students who get really low scores and sometimes miss the diploma entirely. The tests would detect that, though. I was fortunate to have a good program in my public school, plus I had a really strong work ethic back then.
You’re right about ToK, though—it was basically useless.
From my perspective, the problem with the IB program is not its tests, but that it requires a fairly high level of understanding across every one of many subjects. It does not permit compensating for average ability at one subject with mastery of another, or even of every other one.
In this respect it is quite cookie-cutter: a renaissance person is good at everything and that is what is expected of IB students, but in the real world, it is possible to find vocations, even radically cross-disciplinary ones, that fall short of using every sub-category of skill.
Not everyone has to be able to apply economic models to biological systems undergoing transformations that differ over time in an original computer-program and write an essay on it worthy of winning a literature award and give a prize acceptance speech in French on how the philosophy of science has been previously limited by particular psychological roadblocks but the sociological function of winning this award will change that, once the musical written, directed, and starred-in by the genius to commemorate the occasion takes over Broadway.
A tiny bit of specialization isn’t a bad thing.
If there were a Broadway musical based on that second-to-last paragraph, I would be first in line.
I would have to disagree with you. I took both AP and IB tests in Economics and Spanish, and to me the IB test was more about the amount of stuff you could write down in the time limit than about understanding. Since the test questions are virtually the same from year to year, it is easy to study the test rather than the subject, and I certainly didn’t feel like preparing for the tests taught me anything in the anticipation-constraining sense. (I got a 7 on both, so I don’t think this is entirely attributable to incompetence)
That said, the IB program is definitely more rigorous and meaningful than a typical public school experience, and saying it isn’t up to the standards of LessWrong isn’t really a criticism. I don’t mean to be too harsh.