I’ve coached hundreds of students through the IB. I’ve also sat on the other side of it, as the parent of a daughter who went through it herself, and honestly those are two very different vantage points.
The question I keep asking her
Now that she’s at a very good university in the UK, doing the course of her dreams, I sometimes ask her. Do you think it was worth it? All that trauma, all that IB, did it actually help? Honestly, I think her first year at university has been an absolute breeze for her. She’s found it easy to score a two one, and the essay practice, I like to take a little credit for having taught her English myself. But I think the rigor of IB really taught her to be independent, to manage her own responsibilities through a hectic workload. Managing new friendships, living alone, her own household tasks, her own loneliness, her own decision making. I think all that stress has probably hardened her in a good way, and given her confidence in her own ability to navigate her own life.
What I think the IB gets right
Choosing your own IA topics and making them real. Doing your own university level research for your EE. Having an expansive mindset with six subjects plus TOK and EE, even though at the beginning it feels like a lot of pressure, but it forces you to have more tools for your future and to think wider. Even a language you might have hated being forced into, especially in IB, isn’t just about grammar and vocab. It’s about beliefs, values, culture, systems, all the IB global fields of inquiry like identity and justice and politics. That exposure only helps increase your interest in understanding other cultures, and that’s valuable no matter what field you end up going into.
This is exactly why I teach English with such passion, and why we’ve been so successful with our English modules specifically. It’s about expanding the mindset to actually process information, to read and look deeper than the superficial plot, which is what we tend to consume a lot of on Netflix and other platforms now. It’s about understanding the human condition, seeing ourselves in other people and other cultures, and not seeing our challenges as failures. Even something like Antigone, written 2500 years ago, is a phenomenal thing to study because it shows students they are not alone on this journey. So many people have traversed this path across culture and across time, and the human condition really does remain the same. I think that message, and learning to process and articulate it, is probably one of the best gifts we can give our youth as they go into a difficult time of AI, where it’s their humaneness that’s actually going to get them through life.
What I think schools get wrong
I see so many schools cramming everything into grade 12, when kids have only just gone back and everything hits them at once. IAs, EE, university applications, predicted grades, huge amounts of pressure all at once. I really believe timing is important, and the bulk of the work needs to shift earlier into grade 11. I think students cruise through grade 11 and then get a very rude awakening in grade 12, which just adds unnecessary stress.
I also think some compulsory modules are missing. Financial planning, decision making, life skills like meditation and reflection, understanding how money actually works. We can’t deny how important finance is in our lives, and I think we’ve built some very unhealthy habits around measuring our self worth by the money we’ve earned or saved.
The part that worries me most
Predicted IB scores can feel life defining and course defining to a seventeen year old, and I don’t think that much emphasis should be put on them. I think we train young people to measure life success by whether they got the 45, got into that university, got that salary. And that can be very disappointing, especially now when those markers might not be so easy to achieve, or might not come at the time we think they should.
So, was it worth it?
Yes. Not because of the final grade. It’s worth it because of what surviving something genuinely demanding, with the right support around you, teaches a young person about their own resilience. That’s the part that stays with them long after the score itself has stopped mattering to anyone.
