Love it or Hate it, Keep it or Drop it
Senior year scheduling dilemma: you’re sitting in your counselor’s office, choosing eenie-meenie-miney-mo between AP and IB. Which will give you the best chance of passing, and the most college credits?
Starting this school year, students don’t have that choice for some classes. Specifically, AP English and AP Spanish are no longer being offered.
While this might seem a calamity to some students dead set on taking that AP test in the spring, offering only IB lightens the load on teachers and administration, with the program still presenting boundless opportunities for over-achieving students to get their 5.0 GPA, and get their general education credit for freshman year at [insert-top-university].
If taking thirty end-of-the-year tests is a priority for some students, the lack of AP classes does not actually prevent them from taking an AP test. Students can take AP tests without taking AP classes; however, IB requires internal assessments only offered in the classroom.
These assessments, such as the Further Oral Evaluations and Written Tasks, are spread out over junior and senior year.
As English teacher Christine Hodson-Burt put it, “IB is a two year program, AP is contingent on one test given in May.”
What does this mean for students who have taken IB English year one? By senior year, half of the testing process is over! Why switch to AP?
Another point: it’s unfair to teachers and students when one class has six kids and another has 42. So few students were signing up for senior level English AP that the class distribution was hopelessly skewed. Fewer small classes means that rooms aren’t overly crowded, and students can be evenly distributed among teachers.
Now, teachers can also focus solely on honing their knowledge of “IB-land”. According to Hodson-Burt, “[IB] insists the teacher is one of the learners.” Focus can be applied to one curriculum (IB’s), and teachers can deepen their knowledge of the program’s expectations.
These standards present another reason to keep only IB.
According to Hodson-Burt, while AP is a “test-centered pedagogy”, IB encourages creativity, being “student-driven and student-centered”. It leads participants to constant surprise and inspiration.
That might sound like more work than AP’s style of reading and memorizing, but last year, Hodson-Burt said, “students seemed to think everything was pretty comparable.”
So for all the scheduling nightmares, keeping the two-year, thought-provoking, equally-weighted IB program is the best choice for many students and teachers.
