[Lazlow91]

My brother was a member of the first class of students to go through the IB Program at our high school.

There are plusses and minuses to the program.

I'll start with the plusses.

First, and most importantly, you will absolutely get a first-class education with this program. There is no disputing the quality of education it will give you.

Secondly, it will make college workloads less of a shock, as IB is very very very rigorous and intense in the workload.

Also, there are the intangible benefits of being in the best program that the school has to offer.

Plus, it looks great on a college resume.

Now, the minuses.

First of all, this one may not apply to your school. At my school, when the principal went to say he wanted to bring the IB program to the school, other principals objected, because they did not want to lose their best students to us, knowing that they would leave to do the program.

This resulted in our school weighting AP and IB classes the same. However, IB is much harder. Thus, your grade may drop some in IB, and the GPA will drop, too, as it is weighted the same as AP classes.

And, as we all know, colleges are rated on how many students they bring in who are in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. This means that IB students may be out of that category due to the grade slip associated with such hard courses.

This is all a matter of politics. The local schools didn't want to lose their best students. The colleges care about ratings. Basically, even though you get the bes education in IB, you may not get into the best schools.

We have AP kids going to places like Georgetown, Boston, Northwestern, even a few going to Stanford or Harvard. The IB kids are going to Elizabethtown, Drexel, Maryland, Elon, JMU, and a few others.

Now, let's throw another wrench into the equation. The schools the IB kids get into are not big name ivy leaguers. However, they are great small schools, and the IB kids get into the best programs. My brother is one of only 18 people from this country in the International Business program at Elizabethtown.

So, IB will help you regardless of a grade weighting situation if you want to go to a great small school that cares more about great education, small class sizes, and good interaction between professors and students than they do about ratings. The ivy-league schools are huge, and the students are just numbers.

However, if your school weights IB higher than AP in the GPA system, it is all a non-issue.

If they're weighted the same, then you want to think about what you (or your kid) wants to study, and what kind of school they want before you make the final decision.

One other minus is that there is immense work. IB kids are known to come home, say hi to everybody, go to the desk, plop down, and spend all evening toiling away at their work, breaking only for dinner. There is an average at our school of 2-5 hours of homework per night. Sometimes, however, big projects coincide with each other, and students end up pulling all-nighters to keep up.

Basically, you need to think about where you want to go after high school, and how the IB program grades are weighted. That would be the basis of your decision of whether or not to participate in the IB Program. However, as I said, there is no denying the quality of education.

One last thing to consider: AP classes teach you facts. You hear the facts and learn the formulas, etc. The IB Program will truly teach you to think. You will learn to critically think and analyze, instead of just memorizing the details and writing them down on the test.