IB Expectations vs. Reality

Everyone has expectations when they join the IB, but how many are just myths and don’t actually reflect the reality? While the IB is known as a hard programme for students, this belief can be completely blown out of proportion in a variety of ways, including when it comes to the EE (Extended Essay), CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service) and the students around them. Today, I’ll talk about some of the expectations I had (and I’m sure the others around me had as well) when starting the IB, and the reality of those expectations.

Expectation 1: Everyone in the IB is smarter than I am.

Some people (including myself) thought that once I would enter an IB school, I would be surrounded with some of the smartest students in the country and would struggle hugely to keep up with them. I felt like the difficulty of the entrance exams would also equate to how smart the people in my class would end up being and, as you might already know, I felt the Ressu exam was the most difficult  of all the entrance exams I did. Therefore, it made sense that only the best of the best would get in and therefore, I would be surrounded by super smart people that I couldn't relate to nor score as high in in the IB.

Reality:

This expectation couldn't really have been further from the truth. My class is not as 'god-like' as I expected them to be; once I started PreIB I realised that many of them had their strengths and weaknesses in their academic subjects, just like any other high schooler. Some are really good at math but flunk English all the time, but others are great in the sciences and can't stand humanities. I've also seen a bunch of people being not particularly good at any one subject and actually doing pretty mediocre overall. In saying this, my class is made up of some jack-of-all-trade type people, and some others which are super good at one subject and suck at another.

This took me a while to realise though, because when I started in the IB, people wanted to naturally seem as smart as possible. Because of this, their grades started off being pretty close to full points. But when a few terms passed, I started hearing about people needing to retake exams after failing them during PreIB. I talked to these people and they flat out said they didn't like the subject and weren't that great at it. IB students aren't perfect scorers in everything by any stretch and in fact, they are just like other high schoolers outside the IB.

Expectation 2: Humanities subjects (ie. history, psychology, etc.) are all about memorising.

I remembering being told that the IB would need many hours of memorisation of boring information that never really sticks. You just need to keep mulling through thick books, spend hours trying to remember, and once the exam comes and goes, all the knowledge you tried to stuff in your head ends up popping out just to be replaced with more information the next term.

In other words, you need to memorise instead of understand the information you're going through. This ends up being detrimental to you actually being able to revise well because of the simple fact you have SO much information you need to hold in your head. I mean, while it depends on your teacher or school, history HL has upwards to 5 to 10 books to remember by the final exams!

Reality:

Memorisation has, at least for me, been secondary to actually understanding the information... especially within humanities. I don't take any purely science subjects and instead my subjects are consistent of languages and humanity subjects. Therefore, I spend most of my time studying for humanities-related subjects.

I've found that with history HL (and I'm sure this can also be applied to SL as well), you really need to get why things happen the way they do rather than just what happens (ie. a timeline of events). While recalling a list of what happened and reciting the events in the order they happened could help in middle school, the IBDP really pushes you to analyse why something is happening. Because of this, you are no longer just remembering a list of events and knowing the details, you are actually following an intricate story of motives and perspectives that resulted in that specific sequence of events. I use a mixture of techniques to remember events like a story.

One of my first techniques is by renaming important figures to remember them easier (ie. I remember Napoleon I by shortening Napoleon to Nap and adding an 'i' at the end, which then looks like Napi and sounds like 'nappy'). I also create tables with key motives of leaders and why they chose to do certain diplomatic choices along with hand drawn pictures of people and events.

Similarly, with my other subject HL humanities subject psychology, there is a similar expectation that there are too many studies and years and considerations that you have to know for the final exam that the only way to remember them would be through memorising. While this may work for some people, I know I'm terrible at memorising and this never really worked (especially when going through dozens of studies). Because of this, I really tried to treat each study as a short story, where there are different elements that need to be taken into consideration in a story-like format. For me, this meant drawing my notes out as pictures, for example.

Expectation 3: I will never be able to balance social life and school work.

Before I joined the IB, I heard all the IB horror stories about becoming a hermit and studying 24/7. In fact, I feel like it's actually the norm of being an IB student to 'accept' the fact that you will not have any time with friends or outside of school, for that matter. This was not too worrying for me as I didn't have any hobbies that I had to contemplate potentially giving up in light of being in the IB. A lot of my friends, however, had a hobby nearly every day of the week, and I had no idea how they would balance that with school. They, too, were worried about being able to continue their hobby or just having to give it up if they got accepted into an IB school.

Reality:

While I do see how the IB workload could be a lot to handle, it's really not too bad if you manage your time well, plan out what you will do when and ideally, finish homework the day it's given. I have found that over the course of the years I've been in the IB, I have been able to balance EYP (European Youth Parliament) and school, for example, considerably well. The reason I use EYP as an example of a 'social life' or a type of extracurricular would be the simple fact that, although I don't have a continuous hobby I go to, going to EYP sessions results in me missing large chunks (upwards to a whole week) of school. This, so far, hasn't negatively impacted me, but I have done my work beforehand and made sure I received all the information I needed about what would be covered in class. As such, I would say that you should not drop a hobby or your social life in the face of the IB. In fact, if you really do enjoy that activity and still want to do well in the IB, I do believe that everyone has it in them to make time for both and plan out how they'll balance each. It's far from impossible if you set your mind to it.

Expectation 4: 4000 words on some random topic in the EE? That’s awful!

It sounds nearly impossible: an IB student has to write four thousand words about some random topic and it’s worth a lot in your final score. In fact, that sounds like one of the most dreadful things any high schooler would have to endure. I mean, we aren’t in university, so why is the IB asking us to do such a hard assignment without ever having done a similar one before? 

Reality:

Well, to help you get the gist of what the EE actually entails, I’ll give you insight into how I view the EE. I remember being super scared of the EE because of the expectation I’d had from listening to others (read above). I, too, was super worried about having to write four thousand words about some topic that I might not even like! However, I actually really enjoy the EE and now that I’ve chosen a topic I can truly spend hours researching and not get bored, I can see how the word limit is actually super small! While this sounds super unrealistic, there are many people at the same stage of the IB as me that comment the same thing: the word count is actually super small and many people struggle with stuffing all the information into it! 

On choosing your topic to be the one that’s best suited for you, here’s my advice: don’t think about the subject you like the most when deciding what topic you want to do. Instead, look at the general things within your life you would love to know more about, and try to fit this point of interest into one of your subjects. 

I always thought -even before starting the IB and only being in PreIB- I would be doing psychology for my EE, but I never found the topic within it that I know I would thoroughly enjoy. However, my EE is now going to be in history, despite me actually commenting in PreIB that I would NEVER do history. I didn’t like it nearly as much as psych! Only when I started really looking at my interests seriously and what things I was drawn to learning more about, I noticed myself being drawn to politics in the middle east, especially in the light of the refugee crisis! I asked myself what subject this would fit into best, and this ended up being history. If you want a bit of insight into how I did my EE, check this link out. This interest just kept developing more and more once I began my research, and I encourage all IB students to find a similar topic they can see themselves sitting and studying for hours at a time while still being completely engaged and interested in the information they’re reading.

Expectation 5: CAS will be difficult to do.

To put into perspective what doing CAS really means: 150 hours over the course of IB1 and IB2 need to be dedicated to CAS. If you tried to do 3 hours a day consecutively to achieve the 150 hours, it would take a whole 50 days to complete CAS. So, with that said, CAS seems to be a huge task. Plus, with how difficult the IB sounds like with its large workload, CAS just seems like a massive burden that every student struggles to complete. 

Reality:

When I was in PreIB, I was told by a wise IB1 that CAS was actually much, much easier than I thought it was. I didn’t have any hobbies at the time, so I was super stressed out about how I’d ever be able to get 150 hours of random things done! She told me that for CAS, she very literally volunteered at a bunch of concert venues as a wristband distributor and fulfilled all of her Service hours. She laughed as she began to explain that she’d projected that she would easily fulfill two to three hundred hours by the end of IB2. I was stunned, and didn’t really believe her at the time. But, as I came to realise when the CAS time came for me as well, I fulfill my hours VERY easily. I grab any and all opportunities from volunteering for the Red Cross and at different events to attending EYP sessions and do crazy makeup. Nearly everything you do that isn’t school work can be considered CAS, and you can easily take advantage of this (as I do).

Expectation 6: If I try hard enough, I won't fail exams.

In middle school, if you chose to ace exams you were nearly bound to pass with flying colours, so the same should apply in high school, right?

Reality:

Well, to tell you the truth, I know too many people (including myself), that believed the same thing until entering the IB. Sometimes, the IB throws you exams that are, simply put, difficult. I’ve gone through countless exams where I studied for weeks on end only to scrape by with a mediocre grade. For some tests, I didn’t scrape by and actually officially failed. So, I have to redo them. No big deal. I would say that one should not necessarily expect to fail their exams, but to instead not be surprised if you study heaps and really try to score well and end up failing! It happens to the best of students, and it shouldn’t be as taboo as it’s sometimes treated.

HOWEVER, take this with a grain of salt. Sometimes you do unexpectedly well in exams, and other times you don't. Don't stress out too much about the exams you take during the IB as you always have a second chance to score better if you retake or even in your final exams. Just prepare for the unexpected (which is sometimes the worst case scenario of failing), but honestly, you will probably do quite well on the exams you set your mind to! 😀



Disclaimer: IB Entrance Exams in Finland have been cancelled as of 2020. From now on, the Grade Point Average (GPA) will be used as an assessment tool of a student's performance when applying to an IB school.

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