bluecherrytomato Posted June 1, 2020 Report Share Posted June 1, 2020 Hey! In my country tutoring is a business run by adult teachers and not students outside of schools. I'm going to be attending quite a prestigious school this August(2020) but even though everyone is supposedly smart here, they all attend extra tuition classes. The school teachers are really good and the school asks everyone to approach the teachers and not enrol for tuition classes but nobody listens. On another note I have been studying a national curriculum upto grade ten so i have no exposure to the teaching methods of the IB. My board was quite focused on memorisation and rote learning. We barely undertook research work which I hear is a very important part of the IB! Do I need external help for the IB? Should I enrol for tuition services that will take up a lot of my hours weekly and will give me more homework? Or do most students cope up with the diploma programme by themselves? I'm also taking Math AA HL which I hear is very VERY hard and impossible to do without a tuition teacher but I enjoy math soo... IDK what to do please help? Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arrowhead Posted June 1, 2020 Report Share Posted June 1, 2020 Hello hello! Fellow Indian student turned IB student here. I did my 10th in the ICSE Board. Tbh, I found the IB by and large to be piss easy after the ICSE. Although that might have had more to do with my subject choices. I don't know if things would have been different had I done all science subjects and Maths at HL. I did English, History and Economics HL and ESS, Maths and French SL. French was definitely my hardest subject in the IB, the rest of them were super easy by and large. The tuition culture is just an Asian cultural thing at this point imo. I went to boarding after my 10th for the IB and so there were no tuition teachers. I was forced to self-study to get my grades and honestly, it was fine. The IB is not hard, it just requires you to be super organised and consistent. Unlike the Indian board exams, you can't cram for 2 months at the end and pull of a 90+% after having done next to nothing for the rest of the school year. The nature of the IB beast is that you have some kind of graded assessment happening all the time for the whole two years, so you're always on your toes. My advice: If you're someone who is reasonably organised and likes to maintain decent grades, save your tuition money and dedicate time every evening to study on your own. Mooch off good tuition notes from your friends whenever possible, of course! 1 Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluecherrytomato Posted June 2, 2020 Author Report Share Posted June 2, 2020 7 hours ago, Arrowhead said: Hello hello! Fellow Indian student turned IB student here. I did my 10th in the ICSE Board. Tbh, I found the IB by and large to be piss easy after the ICSE. Although that might have had more to do with my subject choices. I don't know if things would have been different had I done all science subjects and Maths at HL. I did English, History and Economics HL and ESS, Maths and French SL. French was definitely my hardest subject in the IB, the rest of them were super easy by and large. The tuition culture is just an Asian cultural thing at this point imo. I went to boarding after my 10th for the IB and so there were no tuition teachers. I was forced to self-study to get my grades and honestly, it was fine. The IB is not hard, it just requires you to be super organised and consistent. Unlike the Indian board exams, you can't cram for 2 months at the end and pull of a 90+% after having done next to nothing for the rest of the school year. The nature of the IB beast is that you have some kind of graded assessment happening all the time for the whole two years, so you're always on your toes. My advice: If you're someone who is reasonably organised and likes to maintain decent grades, save your tuition money and dedicate time every evening to study on your own. Mooch off good tuition notes from your friends whenever possible, of course! Hey! I did the icse too. So is like the research work in ib difficult? Because I’ve heard that that’s what icse students find the most difficult to cope up with. Also thank you so much for making it clear that I won’t need tuitions. I guess now I just need to make sure I don’t fret that I’m the only one not attending tuitions in my class. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arrowhead Posted June 2, 2020 Report Share Posted June 2, 2020 7 hours ago, bluecherrytomato said: Hey! I did the icse too. So is like the research work in ib difficult? Because I’ve heard that that’s what icse students find the most difficult to cope up with. Also thank you so much for making it clear that I won’t need tuitions. I guess now I just need to make sure I don’t fret that I’m the only one not attending tuitions in my class. Research is one way to put it. The truth is, the ICSE students I saw struggle in the IB, and this is just my observation, struggled because they didn't really have opinions and could not bullsh*t their essays. There is a reason a lot of IB students say "IB so I BS". Once you understand the "formula" for how an IB subject's essay is meant to be written, it becomes a lot easier. Again, this applies more to English, History, Economics, etc.-type subjects. Usually, IB becomes easy if you have an opinion and have memorised enough facts and figures to argue for and against your position and then restate your thesis at the end. (Maths and Science subjects are of course different.) I don't really remember doing any crazy amounts of research for any of my IB subjects tbh. But I was really strategic and I picked stuff that would be super easy to do/ research/ find info on. Like my Extended Essay was an English A essay on the theatre of the absurd. There's tons of info about this online and super easy to find and it's a very 'literary' topic, so the 'primary sources' were looking at original plays that typified the theatre of the absurd and analysing them. One of my friends did her EE on apartheid and its effect on women of X province in Johannesburg in South Africa. She went and found people to interview and did interviews with them, etc. She did a lot of work for her EE in comparison to me. But I played the 'IB game' and made sure my essay hit all the 'required points' for an English EE and wrote it in a span of 2 days. We both got As in the end. *shrugs* The IB, in my experience, is not about studying hard, it's about studying smart and learning the rules so you can game the system. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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