The International Baccalaureate: A Diploma of Quality, Depth and Breadth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past 30 years, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IB) has quietly matured into one on the most widely available, and arguably one of the best, advanced academic programs available at secondary schools today. It is clearly time for admissions officers and faculties to step back and take a long look at the IB, which has emerged as a reliable indicator of academic promise, perseverance, and social commitment. Here are the facts: the IB Diploma Programme is a course of study that covers the last two years of secondary school, and culminates in a series of international examinations in various disciplines. Students who participate in the full Diploma Programme are required to study and examine in six different academic subjects. They are also required to fulfill three additional requirements unique to the IB: a critical thinking class known as Theory of Knowledge, a 4,000 word piece of original research known as the Extended Essay, and a minimum of 150 hours of participation in extracurricular activities and community service known as Creativity, Action, and Service. If a student satisfies these central requirements and achieves a cumulative score of 24 points (each exam is graded on a scale of 1 to 7) on the six exams, he or she is awarded the IB Diploma. A student can also choose to take any number of individual IB courses and the subsequent exams; these students are recognized by the awarding of IB Certificates. While the IB is still often thought of as a credential, the two largest IB countries are the United States (406 IB schools) and Canada (89 IB schools). Worldwide, there are over 1,100 schools in 106 countries offering the IB Diploma. These schools come in all shapes and sizes-public, private, small, large, comprehensive, specialized, rural, urban, and suburban. By all quantitative measures, the IB Diploma Programme continues to grow at an impressive rate. Comparing May 2003 to May 2002, 8 percent more schools worldwide offered IB exams; II percent more students sat for one or more IB exams, and 13 percent more exams were taken. In the U.S., 9 percent more schools offered IB exams; 12 percent more students sat for one or more IB exams; 12 percent more exams were taken, and 10 percent more IB Diplomas were awarded. In Canada, the respective numbers were 5 percent, 5 percent, io percent, and 16 percent.1 Although the IB Diploma curriculum and examinations encompass the last two years of high school, formal preparation may begin as early as the seventh year of a child's education. The academic demands that the program puts on students requires them to have significant exposure to advanced classes (especially in math and foreign language) before they formally enter the IB in their penultimate year of high school. In addition, schools use these pre-i B programs to finish as many local, state, provincial, or national requirements as possible. Behind all this is a Swiss foundation, created in the 19605 to facilitate the international mobility of students preparing for university by providing schools with a curriculum and diploma recognized by universities around the world.2 The International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) is governed by a sixteen member Council of Foundation, and a director general heads its worldwide staff. The IBO'S headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland and primary technical support facilities are in Cardiff, Wales. Besides the IB Diploma, the IBO also offers newer programs for the Middle Years (1992) and the Primary Years (1997). The three programs are different in many ways, but they all share the core IB principles expressed in the organization's mission statement: The? International Baccalaureate Organization aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect. To this end the IBO works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programs of international education and rigorous assessment. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.087 | 0.066 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".