the IB's like what, 3 exams at the end of the year? (it was in Belgium at the school I visited, i think).

6, innit?

Gotta study 6 subjects the whole of 2 years, then do 'em all, in addition to having to do a portfolio of 20-100 pages of lab reports and such. One of the biology students even had 167 pages in her portfolio - half of it's coversheets, but the rest are produced by her, so...

ah, so you do one exam per subject then. does the IB vary from country to country or something, because i get the impression you're doing 6 subjects all of which you've chosen yourself - no compulsory ones? that's pretty(!) hard.

It's compulsory to have 1 natural science, 1 social science, 2 languages and 1 mathematics, and one additional subject. There are a few choices in each category, but it's still a bitch to do this, since every subject has coursework to do and we learn more about every subject than is required in the national system.

And A-Levels are a piece of piss, at least it ain't 6 subjects... We have basically the same syllabus otherwise, just that you have less subjects.

ah, i figured there must have been some compulsory element too it, but 5 compulsory categories, that's pretty wank. although i fail to see why you, with only 6 exams (which you either only pass or fail, right?), complain about coursework. personally, i don't see how a-levels are a piece of piss at all. yeah, you can choose some right retarded ones (ie. sociology), but i can't say i've found the experience easy. not necessarily hard, but never easy. can't say i've seen a ib syllabus or specification either, so i can't make that comparison, (if you could url me to one that'd be nice to see). i dare say you've probally never seen an a-level spec either.

I did IGCSE before IB, and was going to do A-levs before I moved back to Finland. However, IB was the closest thing to A-levels being offered here, so I took this. I do know what A-levels are, and I dare say I know what is taught in them as I use the same study guides as you would.

And it's not just pass/fail, it's graded and you get a diploma that says how many points out of 45 you got in bolded font size 48 letters on the front which is your ticket to Uni. Most Uni's take 35's, but some require 40 as well. And courseworks are 20% of that grade, so they're pretty important as well.

It's a right bitch of a system since everything you do affects your grade, as opposed to the Finnish system where you only have the exams in 3-6 subjects, with only Finnish being compulsory.

CBA to browse up a syllabus, but you could probably find one on the IBO page.

ah i see. seems the french bac (which is the one we look at in french, for obvious reasons.) is different to the international bac, and there also seems to be a european bac (was looking through the undergrad requirements for maths at imperial, which seems to distinguish between them). i'm not sure which one it is they use in belgium (perhaps the french bac, après tout, it was in the capital of the french speaking area), but i think my exchange partner was doing his first year. i looked through his folders, the work he did itself seemed like the same standard of an alevel student, the only real noticable difference to me being the complexity of his foreign languages work. his workload wasn't particuarly high either after school, well - mine's greater anyway. if i was to compare my work to his, i'd say mine's a lot harder. but i dunno, maybe that's just a french/belg thing. couldn't find anything useful on that site you gave me, which is pretty strange given the scale of the ibo.

First year is a piece of piss. Come back when he's in IB2, has 27 internal assessment (coursework) things to do in 3 weeks and has the preliminary exams next week and tell me you've got it just as bad.

:o

I have maybe 25 for Physics, 15 for Chemistry and 4 for Math. They're lab reports mainly, but the longest ones are around 2500 words, so you've still got a lot to do. Coursework isn't the appropriate term, it's just the closest thing that you've got to this. These are internally assessed works that are then moderated at random by examiners (ie. they take 5 portfolios out of 30 and then drop all the grades by a few points if they don't agree with how our teacher has marked them).

They count for 25% of our grade in the end, so they're still pretty important. We have an extended essay as well, which is 4000 words and counts for 5% of your total grade (as a total of all subjects) in the end, but that's compulsory as well.

It's a pretty unique way of doing things, and it's a real bitch when you think you can slack off in the first year, when in reality, you can't.

two years work in 2 weeks..... i done that last year :) lots of fun!!

IB? plz... it's nothing compared to A-levels

i miss school.

It's worthless drop out of school now and sell yourself on the streets of Moscow.

Why bother?

Because you want the kind of life doing well in education (be it A-Levels, IB, degrees) will give you.

And if you don't want that kind of life there isn't much point in jumping through the hoops of formal education.

Amazing.

i dont know how it works in Finland but over here(UK) i went to college after leaving school at 16 and hated every minute but stuck at it for a year to get a qualification, seeing as i was half way through.

But now all my qualifications from school/college are useless since 18+ the qualifications i've achived now actual mean something and will guarentee me a job. Even with the qualifications i have now i've walked straight out of jobs and into a new one just down to the fact of what qualifications i have. But college degree's don't.

Its a ladder,

Failing at high school = Fail to get into college
Fail at college= Fail to get into Uni
Fail at Uni= Fail to get your job you wanted
Fail to get a decent job=Fail to bone Mandy from the local.

ladder for the sheep....

the only thing that matters is what you know, not what kind of certificates/degrees you have

I mean, I wish it was that way. I'm a very fast learner, but am totally unmotivated to doing work if it's for something I don't care about. I skip only certain classes in school because I hate them and I don't really care about the results from these classes.

However, when there is something I care about, such as gaming at the moment, then I can easily burn hours working my ass off for it and writing thousands of words of interviews, previews, news items and organizing matches and servers.

I admined a LAN tournament in Denmark in November where I slept 6 hours a night, but was up and running all my waking hours trying to keep everything on schedule. The thing is, I loved it, even though that was more work than I'd done in the past year for everything school-related combined.

That's why degrees are a pain in the ass - there's always something that you'll need to do to get through it that you don't care about at all. However, you still have to pull it off successfully or you won't get any credit for everything else you've done really well because you love doing it.

thats not true, you can do what you like, its your choice, no one forces you.
eg. you like gaming, simply make a company that has to do something with gaming, etc. you dont have to work boring 9/17 job

Mhm, but for Uni there's always going to be something you hate. Jobs are the same. Mostly living "the good life" is about eliminating the things you hate and concentrating on the things you like, but the point is that you still need to jump through the hoops of formal education to be able to do what you want in the future.

And you would you propose to set-up this venture?

Since you have no qualifications, you have never had a decent job. I dont know what bank you would go to which would be happy to invest its money in your idea. You try walking into a bank and saying 'Hi, I like computers. I want to start a gaming company' You will get laughed at.

And to add to the point you made earlier about it being what you know not what kind of certificates/degrees you have is a load of rubbish. Would you seriously go to a doctor who had never been to medical school, but said he had learned all he needs to know from his experiences?

I wouldnt

you sound like one of those "give me loads of money and i will do it"
you can always start small, the size doesnt matter (so to speak of :)), as long as its something you love to do and it keeps you alive

and certainly YOU would get laughed at, because thats not how you get money. even if i wanted money from investors (which i most likely wouldnt coz i dont like to depend on someone's money), i would first think hard/long and design a very good and solid project with market research, income/short/long term plans/investments/etc which would include past project experiences (i wouldnt start unless i did e.g. several succesfull LANs and so on)

as for doctor example - this wasnt the best example, because being doctor means others lives depend on him, and getting proper "education" is pretty hard on your own given the amount of otherwise inaccessible technology required (esp something technologically complicated like advanced surgeries/etc)

the problem is not with the certificates/degrees but with the way people can acquire them or get them and yet have no usable knowledge. i know way too many people with c/d who cant tell their own assholes from a hole in a wall, which makes those c/d useless in my eyes
(i work at local university as system admin, so i know how getting c/d works :)
btw i have no single IT c/d (even tho i could get them all in a couple of days if i succumbed to THE system :)

IT certificates are ass though, everybody knows that. Thing is that I really don't have many passionate interests outside of computing and am thus inevitably drawn to doing a Uni degree in CompSci.

On the other hand, it is better than people who just don't know what they do, so they settle for getting an MBA, which teaches you nothing. MBA graduates learn how to make money out of money, not how to create anything. All they do is exploit the work of others for personal gain, and I just can't respect their work at all.

The fact that so many are employed in the business of making money is a sad consequence of the global market economy that has successfully been exploited by so many insanely rich people. Hell, I even respect Bill Gates more than speculators, since he did have his hand in the original coding of Windows (although he hasn't touched a compiler in decades...).

banks in Europe will not give you money, how ever that´s what venture capitalists are for.

IF the idea is good, they will be interested.

btw, you can fill up the other spots with qualified people. 99% of the time a business is initiated with several people.

please dont bother ever again.

The IB is a great programm for students who know how to exploit it, dont do jack shit for 1 1/2 years (except for making sure you have good notes).

6 months before the final exams start studying. Thats all that the IB requires you to do. Thanks to the IB program I had lots of free time. Sure my school grades suffered how ever all the teachers knew I was "just" slacking.
The IB rewards the students who work efficiently, and not just the ones that study hard. Ex.You know that you only need to refer to 3-4 books for your IB language A final test. (so dont waste time reading the others, but know the3- 4 books inside out).

The only test which was hard for me was higher physics (got a 5). How ever this was becuase the course material was not what I expected, and did not interest me(which was my own fault). A major reasoin was that we spent the first six months doing frigging ticker tape experiments.

I think IB is a lot more tasking than most college programs because it has the Internal Assessment portfolios. Every subject has work that needs to be done well during your term in school, and your grade isn't only dependent on how you do on the final exam. Yes, I do agree that A1 languages are treated in a rather silly way in the IB, but that's because it tries to be a literature course, not a generally rounded language course.

The difference between your and my experiences may come from me doing the IB in an "elite" school, where slackers are thrown out in the first year and if they continue slacking through the second and third years, then they aren't allowed to take the finals.

Personally, I would have done the national system in hindsight, since that is a system where you go to class, go home, do anything, go to sleep. Day in, day out, and none of the work you do really matters, because at the end of your 3 years you only have to do 3 subjects out of 17. IA's are a bitch, compared to the course that they have in that.

I did my IB at the International School of Brussels. A school full of children from ex-pats, and Belgium high society. So maybe they where a more tolerant school then yours. How ever this was an elite school.

Well I had english a1 higher, German a2 higher, Physics Higher, History Higher. Math Sub, and Anthropology (sub). Whereby my school squeezed the Anthropology class into 1 year.

a1 english only real challenge was knowing all the poems and information about the authors, for the oral exam.
As for the "Internal assesment protfolios", I am not sure what you mean. MAybe that has changed since I did the IB in 97. You had CAS, which was a joke. Sure for the sciences you had the lab reports (which I admit where a pain in the ass, but I only had 1 science course). For the languages you had 3-4 papers. The amount of points given for the extended essay never was in any good relation to the amount of work required for it. So I spent the least amount of time possible on it, and was aware that my efforts where just to enough to get a pass (but hey atleast I did not loose countless weekends to working on it). That was all we had to do for the IB, how ever I might have forgotten a few assignemnets.


I got a total of 38, and never aimed above the 40´s becuase the amount of work required was not worth it (imo). MY goal was to aim for a 6 in each course, especially since my school grades where not that good. IT was important for me to show that I can excell.

As for IB being more tasking, than uni. It depends on several factors. Like the culture of your university. If you go to oxford, university expierence will be easier than for example the belgian universities. In Belgium they sort out a lot of students depending on the grades after the first year, so there is greater pressure to perform at a belgian university than at oxford. The difference is that oxford offers a better quality of education, and it is more difficult to "get in".

How ever the IB does prepare you very well for college. You will find the courses and work very easy in the first year, compared to your peers from the standard schools. At least that was my expierence at the university of maastricht. That is if you dont get distracted easily by the freedom that comes with being a student.

But yeah the big picture. When you apply for a job your IB results will not play an important part (how ever these are the results I show, and I never showed my school grades).
In fact at university getting good grades is only one part of the game. IF you want an easy entry into the labor market, you must realize that networking is of the upmost importance.

I promise university will be more fun than the IB programm. IF you ask me, I will never subject my kids to a programm like the IB. The IB rewards students who work hard. How ever the IB does not reward students who are outstanding in 1 subject, or other non academic (or IB) fields. I think the IB forces the students to delve into to many subjects. I know plenty of IB students who did not do well, and yet later in theirr life have excelled in their uni/proffesional careers.

anyway good luck with the exams, study efficiently. IT is highly unlikely that you will ever be in a situation that applies so much pressure of such a long period of time. In the professional world the pressure can get greater, yet the release and build up periods are a lot shorter. gl.

That's pretty comprehensive I'd say. Thing is, I left the IA's for too late, and I have Chem and Phys as well as HL Math, so that's already like 40 reports I need to do. By college I meant the UK equivalent of the IB (don't ask me why they call it college), but I think your analysis of the situation in Uni is pretty accurate as well from what I've heard.

I understand exactly what you mean about the shortcomings of the IB - it's a great program to stress you out unnecessarily, but it doesn't actually help people who are adept at learning but lazy mofos (like me). I studied 2 weeks for my IGCSE's, absorbed everything, and pulled out 6 A*'s out of 8 subjects.

However, my IB grades will not be half as good because all the IA work (or lack of) will drag me down. However, students who aren't exceptionally bright, yet spend all their free time working (as in, don't socialize with anyone during the weekend) are going to pull off 42-45's.

And as far as the stress goes, it's not that, I can deal with stress. It's just that the result of that stress is rather meaningless and I just can't see what I've accomplished by going through this shit. Neither can anyone at IBScrewed. Just the idea of a site with tens of thousands of users being created to bitch about a program cracks me up...