Well from experience do IB students have an advantage or generally do better than non-IB students? At Mac especially?

It can go either way.

Originally Posted by stja1

Well from experience do IB students have an advantage or generally do better than non-IB students? At Mac especially?

There is probably little to no advantage when it comes to academic performance.

The one advantage to doing IB would be if some of your credits from IB convert to university course credits. I've heard of people doing this, but I don't know of the details exactly. If you can get away with it, you should.

Only adv is credit transfers, if you do well enough in english you can get a full years worth of english credits I believe which is awesome for graduate schools that need it. Don't expect to find it easier to study or anything, however depending on which HLs you took, you may find those courses to contain more "review" content vs non IB kids but in the end there really isn't a difference.

Lol no they get owned just as bad too :p

Originally Posted by blackdragon

Lol no they get owned just as bad too :p

This.
12chars

If you get a 5 or higher in any HL course, it counts as a full year of transfer credits. So I took HL English, HL Chem and HL Econ so I have a full year of transfer credits for each of those courses. I opted not to use my chem because I wanted to take first year chem.

In terms of academics, I thought IB prepared me really well for first year uni. A lot of chem 1a03/1aa3 was review from high school and same goes for bio 1a03/1m03.

But you have to be careful with your transfer credits. If you're looking into entering med school after you graduate, some med schools have conditions on accepting transfer credits. For example, Alberta will only take IB transfer credits if you got a 6 or a 7.

I found that IB helped prepare me for some of the courses i took, especially the ones that had essay writing. The format for essays was nearly the same for most history courses i took. Also, the transfer credits will get you some open spaces on your schedule, but i don't know whether it's such a good idea to skip a year of courses, especially if you're in Life Sci. A friend of mine, who was also in IB and now is in Life Sci opted to forgo the transfer credits, rather then risk missing any new information