Unbeliev-IB-le

I can almost guarantee that two years ago, I was crying. Term 2 of Year 13, and there was always someone crying in the Sixth Form centre. Some people had ‘missed the deadline’. Some people ‘didn’t have enough hours’. Mocks were looming over us and abbreviations were flying thick and fast: EE, CAS, IA, TOK. I cried in Maths lessons when my work came back with a red number 4 written on it. The word was going round that someone had left over Christmas ‘to do A Levels’. We gaped at the thought of someone joining the ranks of those who went to the pub and had study leave, those who didn’t understand us at all.

We did the IB. By Term 2 of Year 13, we had all realized that it wasn’t just A Level students who didn’t understand our qualification. The universities we had applied to didn’t understand it either. Warwick asked for AAA from A Level students and 38 from me: the equivalent of A-star, A-star, AABB, plus a 4000 word research project, 150 hours of creativity, action, and service, and an A in a philosophy course. I had APs instead of GCSEs: American exams you can take from Year 10-13, but which are only listed as post-16 qualifications on the UCAS form. One university rejected me because the first step of their culling process was to automatically reject applicants who didn’t have A* GCSE English. I got the American equivalent of AAB at A Level when I was 15, but the admissions department didn’t know what an AP was or where to look for it on the form. My application was thrown away.

Although the universities in this country define the word ‘education’ differently from me, I believe I got the best available. I would never go back and do A Levels, even though it would have been a thousand times easier to get into university. The IB transformed me, and gave me an education that escapes the frame of a ticked box. My best friend applied to McGill in Canada, 34th in the world rankings compared to Warwick’s 124th, where universities have such understanding and respect for the IB that she was asked for a pass mark of 24.

Perhaps the money invested in Russell Group Vice Chancellor pay rises would be better spent hiring advisors who can overhaul the process of applying with unconventional qualifications. Warwick is losing multi-lingual, multi-capable, and multi-talented IB students who were awarded their diploma in the UK but choose to apply in Canada, in the Netherlands, in South Africa, rather than waste tears on one more phone call to an admissions officer who can’t work out where the extra one, two, or three points have come from in their “Backa…Backa…Backalorrit?”