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Do you think the IB does any spoonfeeding?


Zangetsu

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In comparison to university, IB puts you on their lap, feeds you with a spoon and wipes your face after. You've a textbook, teachers teach you for a million hours a week and help with stuff, there's a point by point syllabus and past papers with solutions. At uni, you're given an idea of what you might need to know, then you have to go out and actually find that out, usually from a different textbook than the prescribed one, cause the prescribed one is crap. Then you've past papers with no solutions, and find out that "oh, we adjust the course year to year, so your exam will be different this year", and you're screwed. 

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Just now, bb8-m8 said:

The last part sums up my fear/disadvantage of choosing a course at uni which will only be newly introduced next year... :/

I got an 85 on an exam with a new lecturer, with no valuable past paper. And 69 (a 1st in the module overall, though) on a module with adjusted exam. If you want to do well, you will, but you will never have such a wealth of resources as you do in school. 

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4 hours ago, Gaby said:

In comparison to university, IB puts you on their lap, feeds you with a spoon and wipes your face after. You've a textbook, teachers teach you for a million hours a week and help with stuff, there's a point by point syllabus and past papers with solutions. At uni, you're given an idea of what you might need to know, then you have to go out and actually find that out, usually from a different textbook than the prescribed one, cause the prescribed one is crap. Then you've past papers with no solutions, and find out that "oh, we adjust the course year to year, so your exam will be different this year", and you're screwed. 

God, can't wait for uni.

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I dunno whether it's so much the IB as just school in general vs University with regard to the decrease in spoon feeding. Go to Uni and nobody will know your name or care about you and whether you're keeping up, learning things, doing well... whereas at school your teachers keep tabs on you and by and large will push you when you need pushing and help you to succeed.

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13 minutes ago, Sandwich said:

I dunno whether it's so much the IB as just school in general vs University with regard to the decrease in spoon feeding. Go to Uni and nobody will know your name or care about you and whether you're keeping up, learning things, doing well... whereas at school your teachers keep tabs on you and by and large will push you when you need pushing and help you to succeed.

Unless you're at Oxbridge. Then they know your name and keep crazy close tabs on how you're doing. 

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5 minutes ago, Gaby said:

Unless you're at Oxbridge. Then they know your name and keep crazy close tabs on how you're doing. 

Haha true but I guess they keep tabs without actually necessarily spoon feeding you anything to help! So still not strictly spoon feeding haha, although perhaps a bit more interest in you as a person and how you are doing than the picture I just described.

At my Uni, if you were in the bottom 5% you had to account for yourself at a meeting with a faculty tutor who basically just told you to work harder. The other 95% remained bar code numbers for as many years as they were there, nobody had a clue about you! :P

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Personally, I don't think IB is really spoonfeeding us, at least not if you look at it from the academic side. Take the EE for example, most of us write the essays by ourselves, with very limited helps from the supervisors. The same thing applies for all the IAs that we have to do. Maths exploration, for instance, I did that all by myself, from beginning to end, from the moment that I had to look for the topic, to the moment that that I proof-read the essay all by myself. And the only help that I got from my teacher was a little smile on his face after I finally handed in my maths exploration. After having gone through all of that, I don't think it's fair to think of IB as if it's spoon-feeding the students.

On the other hand of course, IB is still a high-school program. So in terms of administration and style, I would totally agree with Sandwich and Gaby. There's a huge difference between the way high-school and university works. In high-school, everybody has to attend class every-day. There's like an attendance list, and the teachers would definitely know who are missing from class. But in university, nobody cares about you, other than your friends. You can literally disappear for a whole semester, and nobody would even notice. At least at my university, everything can be done online. Almost all lectures are uploaded freely on the web. I can participate in discussion forums, hand in homework assignments online. And if necessary, I can even access the school servers through my own computer, and work remotely from home. In fact, this is even a better alternative compared to sitting at a library, because the school servers are usually much more powerful compared to the stationary computers at the library. Another aspect that I notice is about the students' interactions with each other in uni. At least from my experience, people don't meet other people in university class, but rather in university clubs haha.

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14 hours ago, Sandwich said:

Haha true but I guess they keep tabs without actually necessarily spoon feeding you anything to help! So still not strictly spoon feeding haha, although perhaps a bit more interest in you as a person and how you are doing than the picture I just described.

At my Uni, if you were in the bottom 5% you had to account for yourself at a meeting with a faculty tutor who basically just told you to work harder. The other 95% remained bar code numbers for as many years as they were there, nobody had a clue about you! :P

No, totally no spoon-feeding, just very close tabs. That's why I often referred to my room in halls at Oxford as a prison cell :P

My uni is the same - there are 200 people in my year in my degree alone. Unless it's some high-involvement class (I had one with loads of presentations, team exercises and stuff like that), or a small one (like my 50 person business law module), you're literally just a bar code. Which is kinda sad but I guess to be expected. 

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