At the Request of the Public…
It has been pointed out to me that my two posts about the IB DP in my school paint a very dark picture of it indeed. That is certainly true, and no wonder they do, as they were intended to highlight the bad aspects in the first place. However, just so you do not think the IB DP in Riga State Gymnasium No. 1 is not useful at all, I will devote this post to some (but not all) of the good things you gain by doing it. I will be implicitly comparing it to doing the standard Latvian programme of secondary education, because that is usually the other choice for someone in Latvia unsure whether to do the IB DP.
I will also use the generic ‘you’, and if you (the non-generic one) feel offended by that, feel free to replace it with something more neutral in your mind. Or use (or produce and then use) a grammar-aware piece of software to replace it for you before you start reading. But really you should see this as me addressing prospective students who are deciding whether to do the IB DP or not.
- All or almost all, probably depending on your teacher of mathematics, written work is done in English. (At least all written work in the subjects I did was done in English. To the best of my knowledge, this applies to other subjects just as well.) Of course, there is one exception and that is languages, where all written work is done in the language studied, and additionally, as I have mentioned, if you happen to have a problem in mathematics that actually requires you to write anything in prose, the maths teacher may also be upset if you write in English, but I cannot even remember the last time I had to write anything in prose in maths, and the notation used is English (more on that in point 4). So, back to writing exclusively in English, what you gain by this is, well, invaluable practice in academic writing in English. And to help you further improve your academic writing, the English course also includes classes devoted to it.
- Most of the reading you do is in English. The consequences should be obvious, or if they are not, I will just say they are analogous to the consequences of doing most of the writing in English.
- You get used to examinations in the style you will see at universities of the English-speaking world. Well, okay, I cannot really speak for the whole English-speaking world, but the University of Cambridge certainly counts. The style here refers to all aspects of exams, including the division into papers, the structure and formulation of questions and the proceeding of the actual exams.
- You get used to the mathematical notation used in the English-speaking world, and besides just being better at times, it can be different enough from the notation used in the Russian-speaking world (which is what is normally taught in Latvia) for you to get lost when looking at it if you have not met it before. Also count in variable names used in physics.
- The load is such that I still doubt universities can match. But I will probably learn more about this statement as my uni course progresses… (Oh, and yes, it is a good thing. It does not at all seem like one while you are doing it, but after you go through the IB DP at Riga State Gymnasium No. 1, you have received training on load withstanding that will make loads you encounter in the future seem literally laughable to you.)
- You actually learn more than you do if you do a standard Latvian programme in the Riga State Gymnasium No. 1, when you actually learn more than you do if you do a standard Latvian programme in another school. Exception: if you do a course specialized in something other than mathematics or English, you may (or may not; that depends on your subject, course, diligence and assiduity!) learn more in that subject than you do if you do the IB DP. And of course, you can always learn little in the IB DP too (and get a bad mark), but if you are interested in this point at all, I would hope you are serious enough about actually studying.
This is it for today… If I suddenly realize I have forgotten something important, I will just add it to the list.