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IB Materials not free? (past papers, syllabus)


dubyawhy

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As opposed to the IGCSE, AP or A-Levels, IB is probably the only programme that is so protective over these documents. Documents that SHOULD be made available for free.

Is IBO a for-profit organisation? Because this is quite unusual.

Just coming from IGCSE, I am quite used to the concept of going online to look up syllabi and doing lots of past papers. £20 for an Economics syllabus is OUTRAGEOUS. I downloaded my IGCSE one for free, and dozens of papers along with it. I thought IB was all worldly and progressive and stuff like that. This does nothing but open the achievement gap between rich and poor. Some of us can't afford £103 for a questionbank, while those who CAN get a HUGE advantage in terms of access to practise questions.

Browsing around the "IB store"(a weird concept in itself), you can also find baseball caps, T-Shirts, clocks and other crap educational foundations have no business selling.

Any insight as to why it's like this? It will cause nothing but disillusion from students who have chosen to do the IB. If they wanted to keep past papers secret, then at least ban them outright instead of making them available to kids with money to burn.

I must be missing something.

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The IBO is a non-for-profit organisation. While all those things are 'meant' to be paid for, chances are, they're not. Your school should pay for the syllabi and provide them to you upon request. Alternatively, you can check out our files section for any syllabus you may need/want/require. Question banks should also be provided by your school.

Alternatively, and this is a pretty unorthodox thing to say (but everybody does it anyway), you can really just download everything. Past papers are easy to find if you know where to look, so are Question banks and syllabi. The internet is at your fingertips! Most people download everything, and while, yes, it's not very good to be asking students to pay 103 euros for a question bank, just put that out of your mind, and search google :)

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The idea is that teachers should be the ones buying material, such as past papers, so that students can get the exam practice they require. I truly hope that no student actually has bought a questionbank for £103 or similar. That would be horrendous. I would agree with that it is by no means a perfect system, but the IBO believes that such documents should be regulated, and accordingly there is not much to do about it. Except downloading the syllabi from our file section of course, and hoping that you have a good teacher who will supply you with adequate practice material.

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I agree with OP. It's ridiculous the amount of work you need to go through to get a sylabus/ rubrics and past papers.

I believe even though IB is a not-for profit organization, they make a lot of money, which they then use to pay all additional fees and maybe even give better a better salary to their employees.

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