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Choosing to NOT take IB Exams


new2ib

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I am an IB Grade 12 Senior and am in the process of registering for the seven IB exams that I have to take this Spring. It is going to cost upwards of $500 and a month of stress and no sleep. I know that without the IB Exams, a diploma is not possible but this is okay with me since I only took IB courses for the knowledge rather than college credit. However, I heard that if you do not take an IB exam, you cannot pass the IB course you are in, and thus will not be able to graduate high school? Is this true? Can IBO really force students to take the exam??

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:blink: This question is very confusing to me, possibly because I have no idea how the american school system works, but it seems unreal to me that you could pass any course without taking the exam in it!

Round here, if you didn't take the exams you'd have no proof you'd ever studied anything at all (and therefore would have totally wasted 2 years). It depends what "graduation" is (we don't have the concept of graduating from school, you don't get a prize/certificate for turning up, you only get certificates to show you learned something - i.e. your examination grades). If it is the case that at your school you get a certificate for having turned up for 2 years/however many years and that's what is considered graduating high school, then you'd probably have to ask your school, I guess! They should give you one if they know you attended the lessons, maybe. Although anybody could turn up for 2 years and not learn anything, so it seems to me like it'd be a bit of a strange thing to consider a "pass".

The IBO doesn't force students to take the exams (they can't) but you won't have any certificates, grades or diploma if you don't sit the exams. That's kinda a fundamental part of any course to have your knowledge tested at the end. You can choose not to do it, of course, but then... well, round here at least, that'd be crazy talk because you'd basically leave school with no qualifications whatsoever, so you may as well not have gone. You'd never get into any Universities because you'd effectively have no higher education -- and even if you explain that you did go, just didn't sit the exams, grades say a wholeee lot about how good you are at a subject, and you'd have no grades, so you'd never get accepted anywhere with no proof you'd ever learned a single thing!

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If you can't pay for it, then talk to your IB Coordinator. If you can but don't want to, well I think it's a valid thought.

To answer your question, I'll make an analogy. If you take an AP class at my school, you have to take the AP exam at the end of the year. If you don't you don't get the benefit of an extra point on your GPA [like out of a 4.0, an A in an AP class is worth a 5 while an A in a regular class is worth a 4] and you have to take a final exam [usually, the finals for AP classes are the AP exams themselves, but you don't get a grade for the final--it's just exempt]. Maybe your school has a policy like that for IB. I suggest you sit down with your IBC for half an hour and hash out things. This will take care of the possibility.

Many/most colleges recognize IB, and some even offer credit for it. If you haven't taken many APs, you'll want to take advantage of the IB exams to help place you in advanced standing or even exempt you from certain classes. If you know what college you want to go to, and it doesn't offer credit or any incentives for IB scores, shoot the admissions officer an email, telling him/her what your situation is [don't mention the fact that you just don't want to study], that you've done the coursework and put the effort into IB, and ask if they'll think less of you. Many colleges, from what I've heard, don't care about what you got--it's the fact that you did IB that impresses them, but maybe they won't be as impressed if you just don't try?

Sandwich, in the US, we get an IB diploma in addition to a high school diploma. You'd use the HS diploma to get into uni, with the courses you took over the four years and the SAT/ACT scores to show where you are at a national level.

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