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IB "cliques"?


wombat123

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My school isn't a full IB school - there is only a small fraction of the students doing the IB Programme. I've heard that some of the students doing the regular program find the IB kids somewhat cliquey, and withdrawn from the rest of the school. Not sure if everyone feels this way, but for those who do not attend a full IB school, is the situation similar? Are the IB kids sort of "sectioned off"?

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My school isn't full IB either, so in grades 9-10 I had a few mixed classes with both IB and regular students. I remember that in my business class all the pre-IB kids sat at the front :blum: We talked to the other IB kids most of the time, and in group projects we would have only IB people in the group. We didn't do this because we think we're better than the regular kids, it just happened that way because we already had our classes together so we knew each other better. We still talked to the regular kids and sometimes we worked with them on group projects too.

I wouldn't say that we're cliquey, it's just that we have a lot of classes together (unlike the regular students, who are usually mixed up) so we know each other well. Plus we have way fewer kids in IB at my school (around 400 in total) than regular students (2300 students), so it would make sense if we knew each other better. We still talk to the others, though. I have quite a few friends at school who aren't in IB.

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My school isn't full IB. There's about ~400 people in Pre-IB and IB and about ~1500 that are not. I actually agree that IB kids can be cliquey. In our lunch break, the majority of the IB kids will be in one half of the cafeteria, while the non-IB kids will sit on the other half. There are some people who, at school, will refuse to take a class that isn't IB or work with non-IB people. It's not always true, but sometimes they regard themselves as "above" the non-IB kids and don't want to be associated with them. My younger sister, who's in Pre-IB, has a friend who thinks all IB kids are cliquey, think they're superior, etc. While this isn't true, I can see why she would think that.

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We only have like 40 IB kids in our class. And yes we kind of withdraw from the rest of the school. And even inside of this group we have more cliques :blum: I just go with a 2-3 people for lunch out of the 40 or so IB kids.

Really it seems to be the nerd group that takes 2 sciences (or 3...) and then the theatre kids

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  • 2 weeks later...

I can see how IB kids can be associated as being a clique. But I definitely think it's more that you become friends with other IB kids cause you spend so much time with them. For example, in my senior class we have only 5 diploma candidates. I wasn't really friends with the other four until this year. I always had my other friends who weren't doing the diploma, or ib at all. But this year, all five of us are prettyy much forced to be with eachother a good 5 hours a day because of coincidentally all our subjects are pretty much the same so we just become friends. Lunch, we spend time with eachother in a circle doing physics homework or whatever but I mean, not to be mean or anything but If I wasn't doing IB with those other four, I doubt that I would have ever been friends with them although they are great kids.

Edited by snapbanana
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Out of a school of 2500, there are I believe 9 diploma candidates this year. Not exactly stellar, I know.

Our classes do indeed feel cliquey, but only in the sense that most of the kids like to hang out mostly with each other. They're not jocks, nor artsy, nor druggies; they're just IB kids. Mostly.

Actually, I guess I would be the only exception to that, haha.

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There are around 60 of us (which is too many, in my opinion(because it forces us to have classes of 30 people)) and everyone is friends with non-IBers. I would say it's generally a non-issue. The senior class is much cliquey-er than we are.

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No cliques whatsoever. About 20 of 60 students are IB, but we're all friends with one another. The only thing that annoys me is when the non-IB students think they have the same pressure as IB students do. No, you don't. You just wish you did, lol.

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For my school, There is a large difference between IB and non-IB. to get into the pre-IB diploma, you needed to take a test, of which about 20 % of students were submitted. Therefore our school has the IB students, and the "regulars", or the people who are zoned and meant to go to that school.

So out of all the IB students, we have formed a clique, and the difference in attitude is evident in the two student groups.

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In my year there is about 400 students all up and 25 of us are IB students. We are kinda our own little group in the school but that is mostly because when you spend mos of the day together you do become friends and a lot of the people if I wasn't for IB I wouldn't be friends with. Also I think part of why we all became friends so easily is because within the IB group at school there is less judgment like it is no longer a bad thing to be smart or a nerd or anything like that where there are still stereotypes outside the IB group.

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My school was really cliquey up until about last year and this year. Suprisingly so, the people who were being cliquey were the non-IB students. I think this was due to the teachers' poor treatment of them. some of the teacher at my schoo \l tend to make non-IBers feel bad for not going into the program; therefore, while the IBers work their asses off, he others get cliquey and kind of shove the IBer away. I think it is a self-defense method because they feel bad cause of the teachers. Last year, when my class went into the IB, we had quite a few students who chose not to do IB and other chose just certificates, but we all had classes together. We all get along great, no cliques... I think it is because there was so much variety in programs in one class that we all just stayed friends...

:blum:

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We had an IB and non-IB clique to some extent -- slightly ameliorated by two facts: firstly that we all did the same course until the IB years and secondly that the IB people didn't all get along amazingly well. There were more cliques within the IB than out of it, I think! People tended to still belong to main cliques that they'd been in before we split off to do different courses, too, so we already had about 7 or 8 different 'sets' represented. Also the European boarders only did the IB, none of them did A levels, so that was another set. Only a small fraction of the year did IB, so I remember always being impressed by how divided we were, ahah. Not necessarily a bad thing in terms of being integrated with the rest of the year, of course.

Most of the 'clique' was just that we had a different timetable so all the A Level kids had free time and could eat lunch together, whereas we had only 20 minutes for lunch (thank-YOU lunch time lessons) and very few frees. When we had frees generally never coincided with people doing normal courses. So IB people ended up hanging out with each other, at least during school hours.

That and in IB2 we all simultaneously died under a mega workload and even though we didn't necessarily club together that much before, we did start convening to commiserate with one another in corridors about the almighty crapness of the teaching etc. and pass past papers around. United by difficult circumstances :blum:

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I think the post about how we're all just "in more classes together" and so that must be why we're all friends is pretty crazy :) I think there's something to this theory, but it's not the whole story.

We have pre-IB (9&10) and IB (11&12) at my school, with about 300 Pre-IB, 800 non-IB. I have to say that in my experience it doesn't matter how little you know the other IB kid, you tend to bond with them much, much faster than the other kids. Similar academic performance groups with similar academic performance, and so the less school-oriented IB kids get along with the less-school oriented IB kids and some non-IB kids. But the super-school oriented IB kid doesnt generally ever hang out with the non-IB kid even though their less-school oriented counterparts do. So I wouldn't say it's just a 'more classes together' thing, because both the more-school and less-school IB kid takes the same amount of classes with non-IB kids. And apart from this "less-school IB with more-school non-IB" idea, in general, it's completely segregated. There's definitely some "I cant relate to non-IB kids" going on here (I dont think it's a superiority complex though - some people actually feel inferior to the non-IB kids and would love to hang out with them for social reasons). The other thing that comes into play is the "coming together against adversity" mentality.

Cliques aren't really a highschool deal though, I think it's worth noting that birds of a feather flock together. It's just that you tend to notice cliques less in the real world when you're so much more isolated from the kinds of people you don't prefer to be around. If you're in X uni program / profession, you're automatically around the kind of people who like X uni program / profession and hence who kind of would have fit into your clique in highschool anyways. The psych kids really do hang out with the psych kids, arts with arts, science with science. In this way, cliques still form outside of highschool and whatnot, they're just less noticable because the people we would otherwise be distancing ourselves from have already been distanced from us.

Edited by Singularityy
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Just want to mention quickly that for Junior High, I attended a school that offered the IBMYP. There, a school of over 500 was split into three distinct groups: 200 were in IB, 200 the regular classes ("Reggies" as we 14-year-olds called them), and the rest in the special needs classes. Almost no permeability existed between each of the three; IB kids almost always hung out with only other IB kids, certainly never with the special needs kids. And although some kids liked to float between the Reggies and the IBs, there were maybe only 4 or 5 of them, and they were in IB classes. Never the other way around.

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