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.
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.