Senior Tribute – International Baccalaureate or Impending Black Hole?

Disclaimer: The interviews were conducted on Monday, 9th May. By the time the article is published, students may have already taken the exams they had not taken during the interview.

Seniors are glad that International Baccalaureate (IB) Final Examinations are almost coming to an end, but for the past few weeks they had a hectic schedule full of papers.

The class of 2016 are the first ones to use the syllabus of the current version in their Group 4 subjects. All G4 subjects, biology, chemistry and physics, had big and small changes, so they did not have the exact past papers to rely on. Senior William Yam says, “Physics was the hardest [of the tests I took so far]. The questions required more thinking, and some of the questions were unexpected. Basically people didn’t know what was coming. It didn’t work that well.” There were additional bleak responses on the Group 4 subjects from numerous students.

Yet not all is disastrous. Yam says, “The bright side of IB is that there is a curve, where the IB basically gives 20~30% to everyone, so really, it should be fine.” IB has a quite complicated grading system of layers of feedback and re-scaled scores. After deleting questions according to the responses they receive, examiners then give curves to students based on the difficulty of the test, mainly by looking at the average raw score of students worldwide. So even those who end up with a raw percentage of 50% might get a 6 on IB Physics, which is a fairly high score.

Some seniors are regretting their past procrastination. Megha Daswani advises, “When you practise past papers, make sure that you time yourselves, and please spend some time on the weekends purely to revise [] material you learned. That way you can literally get sevens on your subjects.” Classes of 2017, 2018 and 2019 can ask and learn from the current seniors who are going through their own Pilgrim’s Progress.