International Baccalaureate (IB)

If you are looking at an IB school, or you are already sitting in one, start with what the IB actually is. The International Baccalaureate, or IB, used to be called the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO). It is a non-profit, it was set up in 1968, and its head office is in Geneva, Switzerland.

It started for a practical reason, and that reason still tells you something about the program. High school students who moved around a lot needed a curriculum they could pick up again wherever they landed, so the IB built one.

Over the past 50 years the aim has widened. The IB says it wants to turn out people who are sensitive, aware, tolerant, curious, self-assured and willing to keep learning for life. In practice that means you get measured on more than what you can recall in an exam hall.

This is not a small scheme. The IB runs in 159 countries and over 5,400 schools, with around 2 million students enrolled. In Turkey, 65 schools use it. So if an IB school is on your list, you are looking at a system that has been running for decades.

The curriculum covers ages 3 to 19. The IB works with governments and international organizations so that curriculum runs properly from school to school, and the same cooperation is what keeps the marking of your work to a standard you can rely on.

The work is hard, but it is meant to be balanced, so you are not buried in one subject at the cost of everything else. It is built to get you through school and ready for what comes after. Well-known universities and training institutions around the world rate it highly, which is worth knowing if you plan to apply abroad.

The IB is also built around how you develop as a person: what you know, how you get on with other people, how you handle yourself. It comes in four parts, and which one applies to you depends on your age.

• PYP, the Primary Years Programme, for ages 3 to 12
• MYP, the Middle Years Programme, for ages 11 to 16
• DP, the Diploma Programme, for ages 16 to 19
• CP, the Career-related Programme, for ages 16 to 19

If you are 16 or over and trying to decide what to sit, the two that concern you are the DP and the CP. Both are covered below.

PYP, the Primary Years Programme

The PYP is for young children, ages 3 to 12. It sets out to raise kids who are thoughtful, caring and involved, and who respect other people and the natural world while they carry on learning. That is the groundwork everything later is stacked on.

Anyone aged 3 to 12 can take part, and it is the base the rest of their schooling stands on. Around 60% of the students who go through it end up with higher grade point averages in middle and high school than students who did not. A grade point average is just the average of your school grades over time.

If you are already past 12, this part is not about you. It matters mainly if a younger brother or sister is being placed in a school now.

MYP, the Middle Years Programme

The MYP is for ages 11 to 16, and it is academically demanding.

It picks up where the PYP stops. The point of it is to get you connecting what you study in class with things that happen outside it.

The MYP runs for 5 years. You can start it at 11 once you have finished primary school and carry it to 16. It has eight subject groups, so you keep a wide spread of subjects instead of narrowing down early.

DP, the Diploma Programme

The DP is for students aged 16 to 19, in the last years of high school. If you are choosing between IB routes at that age, this is the main one.

It gives you a broad education instead of pushing you to specialize early. You get a wide spread of knowledge, and the physical, intellectual, emotional and ethical side of you is meant to come along with it.

If your high school runs the IB, you can finish with the IB Diploma as well as your normal high school diploma. That diploma is recognized worldwide, so it travels with you wherever you end up applying.

The DP lets you study at least two languages. That is partly so you understand your own culture better, and partly so you can deal with people from other ones.

It also has you research one subject of your own choosing in depth, and that research is where your creative and behavioral development is supposed to come from. Then it asks you to think about where knowledge itself comes from, through the Theory of Knowledge (ToK) course built into the curriculum.

The DP sets out to turn out students who can cope with a fast-changing, globalized world. It is made up of six course groups, plus a set of extra parts called the "DP Core" and the Extended Essay.

The DP Core is mostly the elements and course groups in the tables below.

Theory of Knowledge (ToK)	Extended Essay (EE)	Creativity, Activity, and Service (CAS)
Students are encouraged to think about the nature of knowledge.	A 4,000-word essay completed as an independent research project.	Students are encouraged to participate in extracurricular activities.

As the table shows, Theory of Knowledge (ToK) is one of the core courses of the DP.

ToK covers culture, civilization, language and philosophy. It cuts across your other subjects rather than sitting off to one side. By pushing you to think critically, it gets you to work out what knowledge actually is and how you know the things you say you know.

The other thing the table shows is that the DP asks you to do things outside your academic coursework.

That is not an extra bolted on at the end. It comes straight out of how the program is built. Some of those activities mean community service, both locally and internationally.

The activities in that table are called CAS, which stands for creativity, activity and service. In short, here is what each one asks of you.

• Creativity
  • You get involved with the arts and with creative thinking.
• Activity
  • You get physically active and learn what a healthy routine looks like.
• Service
  • You take on a voluntary project you can learn something from. Whatever you choose has to protect the rights, dignity, individuality and independence of everyone involved in it.

Those three parts of CAS are taught, not just ticked off. They grow you personally and socially through hands-on experience, and they give you room to work out who you are.

CAS lets you make your own calls and work alongside other people, and it gives you something to feel good about when it goes well.

It is also a counterweight. The DP loads a lot of academic pressure on you, and CAS is the part that is not that.

Subject Groups in the Diploma Program (DP)

The course groups taught in the DP are in the table below.

Studies in Language and Literature	Language Acquisition	Individuals and Societies
E.g.: Language A: Literature, Language A: Language and Literature, Literature and Performance	E.g.: Classical Languages, Language Ab Initio, Language B	E.g.: Business Management, Digital Society, Economics, Geography, Global Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, etc.
Sciences	Mathematics	Arts
E.g.: Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Design Technology, Environmental Systems and Societies, Physics, etc.	E.g.: Analysis and Approaches, Applications and Interpretation	E.g.: Dance, Film, Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, etc.

Group 1: Studies in Language and Literature

Pick a course here and you are reading British and American literature. You also do translation studies, and the examples for those are pulled from cultures all over the world, so you are not stuck inside one tradition.

Group 2: Language Acquisition

Language ab initio is only offered at standard level. It is the option for you if you have little or no previous experience of the language you pick. Ab initio means starting from the beginning.

Language B is the other route. Take that one if you already know something of the language you are studying.

Group 3: Individuals and Societies

These courses ask how social, political and ideological ideas develop over time. You choose from business, economics, geography, global politics, history, information technology in the global society, social and cultural anthropology, and world religions. If the thing you want to understand is people rather than matter, look here first.

Group 4: Sciences

If science is where you want to spend your time, this is the group. The group covers biology, computer science, chemistry, design technology, physics, and sports, exercise and health sciences.

Group 5: Mathematics

These courses teach you mathematical knowledge, concepts and principles. They also build your logical, critical and creative thinking. And they train you in abstraction and generalization, which means spotting the pattern behind one problem and using it on the next. That last habit is the one you keep using long after the exam is over.

Group 6: Arts

You do not have to take an arts course at all. In place of a course from this group, you can take an extra one from the sciences, individuals and societies, or language groups.

If you do take the arts, the topics get adapted to the cultural setting you are studying in. What sits at the middle of them is creativity, and you reach it through disciplined, practical research in whichever art form you choose. Expect real work rather than a soft option.

International Baccalaureate (IB) Career-Related Program (CP)

The CP is for students aged 16 to 19. It lines up the courses in the IB with what you need if you already have a particular career in mind.

Take it if you want your schooling pointed at a job. It builds skills you keep afterwards: applying what you know, thinking critically, communicating, and working with people from other cultures.

Assessments and Exams

One thing sets the IB apart from other programs. Your final result comes from both internal and external exams.

Internal assessments are usually longer pieces of work. Reports, articles, presentations. Your own teachers mark them, and they normally count for 15 to 25 percent of your final IB grade in that course.

A school running the IB then picks one student at random. It sends that student's assessment and assignments off to a center to be checked over. The point of that is to show the school marked fairly and without bias.

Outside bodies handle the rest of your assessment. It reaches you in stages, mostly as full-length examinations.

Every course is assessed by one single exam at the end of the second year. Know that before you commit. Two years of work comes down to one sitting, and that puts extra pressure on you.

Scoring

In the DP, every academic course is marked on a 7-point scale. 7 is the top grade. Everything else you are assessed on, meaning Theory of Knowledge and the Extended Essay, is graded from A to E instead.

CAS is compulsory, and it is marked pass or fail. There is no score to chase there. You just have to complete it.

At the end of the DP you are given a grade on a scale of 45 points.

Of those 45, 42 come from your academic courses. The last 1 to 3 points come from your Theory of Knowledge and Extended Essay scores put together. So the Core is not a side project. It is worth up to 3 points of your total, and the Extended Essay behind it is that 4,000-word research project.

Advantages of International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program (DP)

The DP is meant to pay off when you move up to higher education, into university and past it.

Over 5,000 universities across 100 countries accept the IB. Holding an IB Diploma can give you preferential treatment in university admissions.

You can also qualify for scholarships on the strength of how you do in the program.

Those scholarships are handed out on your grades. You may also be able to transfer credits and be exempted from certain university courses, so some of what you covered at school does not have to be sat through twice.

• Global Recognition
  • The IB Diploma is recognized by well-known colleges all over the world, so you are not tying yourself to one country's system when you pick it.
  • It gives you the skills and knowledge of a global citizen, and that adds weight to your applications.
• College Prep
  • Treat the DP as a program built to get you ready for university. The curriculum hands you the skills, the background knowledge and the ways of learning you need to do well at that level.
  • By the end of the two years you can write academic reports and essays, cite your sources properly, and run your own research.
  • The DP also sets out to make you good at managing your time. The study curriculum is demanding and moves fast, and that is what builds your capacity to research in depth.
  • Most of all it builds the thinking you need at university, where you run into ideas, concepts and people you have not met before.
• Sophisticated Education
  • The DP aims to give you a broad education. To do that, the curriculum spreads across a wide range of courses for you to pick from and get stuck into.
  • That range is where you show how flexible you are, how much you can take, and how far you will push yourself. Some courses you take at higher level, which means 240 hours of study. Others you take at standard level, which means 150 hours.
  • Picking the right courses and the right levels is one of the big decisions you make inside the program. Make that choice with the department you are enrolled in at the institution in mind.
• Personal Growth
  • The DP is built to develop you academically and personally at once, so it does not stop at your grades.
  • CAS activities are the part that does that job. They put you through a range of extracurricular activities to build you up emotionally and socially, and to give you social skills like empathy and teamwork.