Tuesday, November 25, 2008

IB Courses/ Rigor

On the November "Start a New Post" Anonymous wrote:

From an IB 6 - 12 Power Point handout :"Students can take three paths... "Full" Diploma with all exams, Diploma courses with some exams or Only take Diploma courses."

From a Washington Post article:And since the exams are written and graded by outside experts to match college standards, there is no way to dumb down the teaching of the course without being caught, as long as every student takes the exam.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/21/AR2007052100975.html

- Since students can just take the courses, is there a danger that the demanding course work will be scaled back?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Unless they plan to offer sections of classes with only kids who are not planning to take the exam, I don't think that could happen. If they had sections like that, it would be like the old IS classes. If you look at the IB information on the Schenley web site, not only are the diploma exams graded externally, but I think also some course exams and a certain number of papers are graded externally. The school must maintain academic standards to remain in the program.