A-level or Ib (in-depth)
I have been going back and forth between both of these options. My school is a boarding school which has done ib for a couple of years. I am a European student and am told that the ib would benefit me over the Brits. There is also the issue of Brexit which may mean that I will have to leave the UK. I am an all-round student being predicted 8s and 9s in GCSE. If I were to do Ib I would do English, French and Biology HL and Maths, Economics, History SL. If I did A-level I would do French, Biology, History. I am also unsure of what I want to do in the future at university so I wojld like to keep options. What do I do?
I’m telling you this after 2 wasted years of IB that did nothing but make my mental health deteriorate and given me countless sleepless nights and crippling anxiety. For your sake, do A-levels. IB is completely worthless and if you’re going to the UK you will not be in any disadvantage if you do A Levels like everyone else. There’s this misconception that doing the IB will make unis like you more but it’s so wrong and so ignorant. Do A Levels and you will be more happy than me and most of my friends who do IB.
Why would you take English and not History to HL in IB, if you would take that in A-level...? That seems an odd choice. Otherwise, both qualifications are widely accepted around the world, so there's no real issue with taking one or the other in terms of possibilities in studying in the UK or elsewhere. IB is definitely a very high workload, and you will have a lot of contact hours. Depending what your future plans are, the wider background IB provides you may be useful in a "soft" sense - it won't help you gain admission anywhere over A-levels if you are doing comparably well in each. However, having stronger writing skills or mathematical/quantitative skills, or some language background, could be useful for some degrees.
Anecdotally, a friend of my sister's who did IB (same as both of us) and went on to do medicine at Cambridge said she basically was teaching her A-level background friends (who had all done 3/4 STEM A-levels) on the course how to structure an essay. In a similar way having some more quantitative background than an A-level student who hadn't taken A-level Maths may come in useful on a STEM course (e.g. in biosciences/chemistry), and having a languages background might be useful if you wanted to pick up a language ab initio at uni or were doing a course where languages are very useful (e.g. history, archaeology, anthropology, history of art).
If you took HL History/Bio/Chem you would have the same range of options of degrees in the UK as A-level History/Bio/Chem. Your SL subjects won't give you "more" options, they will just provide you with possibly some wider skills you wouldn't develop in A-level (notably, having some more mathematical background and continuing with French). SL Maths is not a subsitute for A-level Maths in almost any case, so it's unlikely that's going to make any difference, and degrees involving French language study almost always expect A-level/HL French as a prerequisite. Beyond that you'd just have taken economics to some extent, which isn't a required subject for any degree, to HL or not.
Purely in terms of admissions though, the additional SL subjects aren't a benefit and can be a gamble as IB offers are normally made on both getting certain grades in (or across) your HL subjects, as well as an overall score (sometimes also contingent on getting no grade lower than e.g. a 5). As such, if you ended up dropping the ball on one of your SL subjects, it could then cause you to miss your offer (another friend of my sister's missed her offer for Cambridge medicine due to the cohorts English coursework being remarked and dropping from a 6 to a 5). If you aren't very confident in your ability to manage the workload, it may not be as worthwhile to do IB.
Ultimately if you are able to do equally well in both, either is going to get you to the same places. However, determining whether you will do equally both is something you need to reflect on and nobody can really tell you definitely if you will do well in both. Something I would suggest is, given you've done very well across your GCSEs, think more specifically about which parts of your GCSEs you did or did not enjoy. For example, if you weren't particularly interested in and/or didn't enjoy writing about literature and critically reading literary texts, you probably won't enjoy IB English that much and it may be better to avoid having to continue with that subject altogether. Likewise if you struggle or find tedious language learning or mathematical problem solving, then again, you can avoid these by not doing IB. On the other hand, if you are interested in scientific areas for future plans, but feel you might get bored or find it monotonous doing mainly those subjects without any other kinds of study (e.g. essay writing, reading, etc) then IB might help keeps things fresh and interesting for you throughout the course.
Anecdotally, a friend of my sister's who did IB (same as both of us) and went on to do medicine at Cambridge said she basically was teaching her A-level background friends (who had all done 3/4 STEM A-levels) on the course how to structure an essay. In a similar way having some more quantitative background than an A-level student who hadn't taken A-level Maths may come in useful on a STEM course (e.g. in biosciences/chemistry), and having a languages background might be useful if you wanted to pick up a language ab initio at uni or were doing a course where languages are very useful (e.g. history, archaeology, anthropology, history of art).
If you took HL History/Bio/Chem you would have the same range of options of degrees in the UK as A-level History/Bio/Chem. Your SL subjects won't give you "more" options, they will just provide you with possibly some wider skills you wouldn't develop in A-level (notably, having some more mathematical background and continuing with French). SL Maths is not a subsitute for A-level Maths in almost any case, so it's unlikely that's going to make any difference, and degrees involving French language study almost always expect A-level/HL French as a prerequisite. Beyond that you'd just have taken economics to some extent, which isn't a required subject for any degree, to HL or not.
Purely in terms of admissions though, the additional SL subjects aren't a benefit and can be a gamble as IB offers are normally made on both getting certain grades in (or across) your HL subjects, as well as an overall score (sometimes also contingent on getting no grade lower than e.g. a 5). As such, if you ended up dropping the ball on one of your SL subjects, it could then cause you to miss your offer (another friend of my sister's missed her offer for Cambridge medicine due to the cohorts English coursework being remarked and dropping from a 6 to a 5). If you aren't very confident in your ability to manage the workload, it may not be as worthwhile to do IB.
Ultimately if you are able to do equally well in both, either is going to get you to the same places. However, determining whether you will do equally both is something you need to reflect on and nobody can really tell you definitely if you will do well in both. Something I would suggest is, given you've done very well across your GCSEs, think more specifically about which parts of your GCSEs you did or did not enjoy. For example, if you weren't particularly interested in and/or didn't enjoy writing about literature and critically reading literary texts, you probably won't enjoy IB English that much and it may be better to avoid having to continue with that subject altogether. Likewise if you struggle or find tedious language learning or mathematical problem solving, then again, you can avoid these by not doing IB. On the other hand, if you are interested in scientific areas for future plans, but feel you might get bored or find it monotonous doing mainly those subjects without any other kinds of study (e.g. essay writing, reading, etc) then IB might help keeps things fresh and interesting for you throughout the course.
(edited 5 years ago)
Thank you very much. An outside source was really required and I appreciate the time taken to reply.
Original post by artful_lounger
Why would you take English and not History to HL in IB, if you would take that in A-level...? That seems an odd choice. Otherwise, both qualifications are widely accepted around the world, so there's no real issue with taking one or the other in terms of possibilities in studying in the UK or elsewhere. IB is definitely a very high workload, and you will have a lot of contact hours. Depending what your future plans are, the wider background IB provides you may be useful in a "soft" sense - it won't help you gain admission anywhere over A-levels if you are doing comparably well in each. However, having stronger writing skills or mathematical/quantitative skills, or some language background, could be useful for some degrees.
Anecdotally, a friend of my sister's who did IB (same as both of us) and went on to do medicine at Cambridge said she basically was teaching her A-level background friends (who had all done 3/4 STEM A-levels) on the course how to structure an essay. In a similar way having some more quantitative background than an A-level student who hadn't taken A-level Maths may come in useful on a STEM course (e.g. in biosciences/chemistry), and having a languages background might be useful if you wanted to pick up a language ab initio at uni or were doing a course where languages are very useful (e.g. history, archaeology, anthropology, history of art).
If you took HL History/Bio/Chem you would have the same range of options of degrees in the UK as A-level History/Bio/Chem. Your SL subjects won't give you "more" options, they will just provide you with possibly some wider skills you wouldn't develop in A-level (notably, having some more mathematical background and continuing with French). SL Maths is not a subsitute for A-level Maths in almost any case, so it's unlikely that's going to make any difference, and degrees involving French language study almost always expect A-level/HL French as a prerequisite. Beyond that you'd just have taken economics to some extent, which isn't a required subject for any degree, to HL or not.
Purely in terms of admissions though, the additional SL subjects aren't a benefit and can be a gamble as IB offers are normally made on both getting certain grades in (or across) your HL subjects, as well as an overall score (sometimes also contingent on getting no grade lower than e.g. a 5). As such, if you ended up dropping the ball on one of your SL subjects, it could then cause you to miss your offer (another friend of my sister's missed her offer for Cambridge medicine due to the cohorts English coursework being remarked and dropping from a 6 to a 5). If you aren't very confident in your ability to manage the workload, it may not be as worthwhile to do IB.
Ultimately if you are able to do equally well in both, either is going to get you to the same places. However, determining whether you will do equally both is something you need to reflect on and nobody can really tell you definitely if you will do well in both. Something I would suggest is, given you've done very well across your GCSEs, think more specifically about which parts of your GCSEs you did or did not enjoy. For example, if you weren't particularly interested in and/or didn't enjoy writing about literature and critically reading literary texts, you probably won't enjoy IB English that much and it may be better to avoid having to continue with that subject altogether. Likewise if you struggle or find tedious language learning or mathematical problem solving, then again, you can avoid these by not doing IB. On the other hand, if you are interested in scientific areas for future plans, but feel you might get bored or find it monotonous doing mainly those subjects without any other kinds of study (e.g. essay writing, reading, etc) then IB might help keeps things fresh and interesting for you throughout the course.
Anecdotally, a friend of my sister's who did IB (same as both of us) and went on to do medicine at Cambridge said she basically was teaching her A-level background friends (who had all done 3/4 STEM A-levels) on the course how to structure an essay. In a similar way having some more quantitative background than an A-level student who hadn't taken A-level Maths may come in useful on a STEM course (e.g. in biosciences/chemistry), and having a languages background might be useful if you wanted to pick up a language ab initio at uni or were doing a course where languages are very useful (e.g. history, archaeology, anthropology, history of art).
If you took HL History/Bio/Chem you would have the same range of options of degrees in the UK as A-level History/Bio/Chem. Your SL subjects won't give you "more" options, they will just provide you with possibly some wider skills you wouldn't develop in A-level (notably, having some more mathematical background and continuing with French). SL Maths is not a subsitute for A-level Maths in almost any case, so it's unlikely that's going to make any difference, and degrees involving French language study almost always expect A-level/HL French as a prerequisite. Beyond that you'd just have taken economics to some extent, which isn't a required subject for any degree, to HL or not.
Purely in terms of admissions though, the additional SL subjects aren't a benefit and can be a gamble as IB offers are normally made on both getting certain grades in (or across) your HL subjects, as well as an overall score (sometimes also contingent on getting no grade lower than e.g. a 5). As such, if you ended up dropping the ball on one of your SL subjects, it could then cause you to miss your offer (another friend of my sister's missed her offer for Cambridge medicine due to the cohorts English coursework being remarked and dropping from a 6 to a 5). If you aren't very confident in your ability to manage the workload, it may not be as worthwhile to do IB.
Ultimately if you are able to do equally well in both, either is going to get you to the same places. However, determining whether you will do equally both is something you need to reflect on and nobody can really tell you definitely if you will do well in both. Something I would suggest is, given you've done very well across your GCSEs, think more specifically about which parts of your GCSEs you did or did not enjoy. For example, if you weren't particularly interested in and/or didn't enjoy writing about literature and critically reading literary texts, you probably won't enjoy IB English that much and it may be better to avoid having to continue with that subject altogether. Likewise if you struggle or find tedious language learning or mathematical problem solving, then again, you can avoid these by not doing IB. On the other hand, if you are interested in scientific areas for future plans, but feel you might get bored or find it monotonous doing mainly those subjects without any other kinds of study (e.g. essay writing, reading, etc) then IB might help keeps things fresh and interesting for you throughout the course.
Original post by R0bsterL0bster
Thank you very much. An outside source was really required and I appreciate the time taken to reply.
I would say, having done IB myself, I do feel IB can be a disadvantage in admissions generally if you aren't able to get strong results across the board, due to how UK universities assess it. However, I also think it is much better general preparation in terms of "soft" skills than A-level, as you will necessarily develop these in abundance across the range of the IB subject areas. On my engineering course I pretty much constantly got told how good my writing, referencing, source finding etc was for example, and I've found a lot of the skills useful generally in work and otherwise. That said I think I also was given "the benefit of the doubt" in several of my applications due to having done IB, although I have no direct evidence of that...
However, I do think also it is a gamble in terms of admissions if you aren't able to maintain a strong showing across the board and don't have a sustained interest in all your subjects (for me, English Lit and Biology became torturous experiences pretty quickly in IB, and Psychology later joined those as being something I didn't look forward to at all). Additionally, while developing soft skills is very important for employability later on, and is something that frequently gets identified as a deficiency among STEM graduates, this is something you can develop in university (and they will try to develop this, you just need to lean into it a bit, which a lot of students in such areas don't).
This is compounded by the fact STEM subjects at degree level more than other areas require a strong base of knowledge in relevant prerequisite areas typically, and are improved by taking more STEM subjects at A-level cumulatively more than taking other subject areas. So if you knew you wanted to study a non-clinical STEM course, A-levels might be a better option in that regard. On the other hand I think the wider range of soft skills developed in IB, including more quantitative and analytical skills, are actually more useful for "arts" subject areas compared to just "stacking" essay subjects at A-level (where there is a bit of a diminishing returns in terms of these soft skills I think, and unlike STEM subjects there are usually fewer if any formal subject requirements).
Most of this is just personal opinion though, and I certainly don't have any non-anecdotal data to support it, so take that with some large pinches of salt
(edited 5 years ago)
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