Bluemax ARA Assoc

I am consistently surprised by the sheer volume of time absorbed by the rigours of the IB Diploma Programme in English Literature, and the range and pace of the course structure and components. I can’t help but hark back nostalgically to my A-level English days, where stodgy books and poetry anthologies were digested at an alarmingly pedestrian academic rate and students were left in a flabby, vaguely post-colonially themed stupor for weeks at a time. 

The idea of a sleek and stealthy 4000 word Extended Essay would have caused uproar, and possibly some form of violent revolt, and the anxiety inducing jamboree of the Independent Oral Commentary would have turned brows already preoccupied with how to say “I play football” in German and in at least seventeen different tenses into furrowed canyons of confusion.

The difference between the UK A-level and the IB is handily exemplified in the two course’s epistemological papers. The Theory of Knowledge (TOK) appears awash in philosophical nuances and foundational thinking. It is, apparently, a “flagship element”. On the other hand, General Studies, or GS, was, at my school and in my time at least, an irrelevant running joke that the major universities seemed to ignore when formulating assessment requirements. 

Revision techniques employed included watching the news the night before the test, and actual exam room answers often disintegrated into aimless, and sometimes extremist, thought experiments composed under the assumption that they would probably never be properly read.

The confidence and cohesion exuded by the IB exam also contrasts to the periodic fits of anxiety and self-reproach that plagued the assessment of the A-level. Stung by criticism that the exams were too easy, defiant and vengeful exam boards would lash out with anomalous fits of searingly harsh marking across random units, with the intent of crudely lowering average scores.

The IB also helps to spread the learning of different languages.  Students must undertake a second language when completing their IB diploma.  In Hong Kong the most popular second languages are French and Mandarin

The future is vaguely organised. The future is IB.