IB Failure: School Policy

[Jakebert]

Hi everyone,

I'm just interested as to what your schools do, my school has a policy of 100% IB passes. Therefore, about half my grade have detentions in the IB Coordinator's office right now until they finish their Extended Essays. I barely dodged that bullet.

What about your schools? Do they care if you pass/fail? What help (whether it's wanted or not) do they offer you?

[Sandwich]

If they reckon you're really not going to pass, they expel you, but otherwise they tend to just keep you in. Our school isn't too bothered by failures, they just assume everybody will pass, then omit failures from the statistics, if there are any. The expulsion technique does mean there're hardly any failures. Brutal but effective! Mostly people raise their game when they realise their grades aren't going to add up, otherwise it's a waste of the 2 years of additional education and all that.

[__inthemaking]

I don't think they really did anything haha.

In my year, 2 people didn't get the diploma (44/46 passed). But there was nothing the admin could've done really, in both cases it was because both students got a 3 on a HL course and didn't get 12 points for the HL courses. So they didn't even know until after exams.

[Feist]

I've never heard of anyone at my school failing, but I did hear circulation of something about not being permitted to take full IB if your marks are not high enough, although we do have people with averages lying in the low 80s taking the program. My school also tries to set deadlines earlier than when they're actually due so I guess that gives a little bit of leeway if something goes terribly wrong.

[Taigan]

My school really does nothing. It's normal for us to have a few people fail every year, but never for stuff like CAS or the EE, our teachers take care of that. Usually the fails are to do with low grades in HL subjects or just low grades overall, and there really isn't much you can do after that except for remarking and perhaps re-sitting (which I don't think our school recommends).

[Chelleee]

oh wow

your school does sound brutal!! (alice's that is)

no ones failed IB in our school...because our class is the first to go through

the teachers have expressed concerns for some students and as a result about half the class sat something called QCS so that IF they do fail, they can convert into a pathway known as "rank"

so in other words, they were told to sit the QCS to have a safety net

but i do remember at some stage near the end of last year, people who were performing poorly had interviews with our coordinator to discuss whether IB was really a good pathway for them or not

that was it really

[Cognac]

Our school unfortunately does not recognise the IBDP as a 2-year course and splits it into two years with an exam at the end of the first where you can actually fail. The funny thing is, they call it 'mock exam'. Many people resit the first IB year because of bad results in the mentioned 'mock', or voluntarily hoping they would achieve better grades.

[DeStijl]

Out of the 60 or so IB graduates the past year, we had a couple of failures. These primarily came from students deciding to do a self-taught A2 language instead of studying the French, Spanish, or Japanese that's offered at the school. Those that chose to do this were pretty darn fluent in their chosen languages, but still only managed 1's and 2's on their exams. Therefore, they failed by default. Disappointing, eh?

Usually, if the IB coordinator senses that you're not going to pass, he'll strongly advise or force you to downgrade to the regular high school curriculum.