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This post will talk about the International Baccalaureate (IB Program) grade boundaries. Honestly I do not like to talk about grade boundaries with students and parents. Because it can often have the effect of demotivating them from studying.
Here are the grade boundaries for: May 2023
Lets look at Math Analysis and Approaches High Level (which is the hardest IB math) for example, the grade boundaries are:
Private online tutor grade boundaries
Here we can see for example that to get a 4 on paper 1 you only need to get (31/110) 28% of the material correct. That is very low, and in fact the average grade is a 4 overall in math AA HL which means that for the final grade the students are only getting 31% of the material. This is more like what you would expect in a university course, but not at the high school level.
One of the challenges with this is that the students find out about the grade boundaries and think: “oh I only need to get 28% correct and I am good”. While that may be “true” it is often used by students to justify them not putting in the correct amount of time and effort to their studies.
Many of the grade boundaries for the harder IB courses are like this. You can look at the pdf above to verify for your specific course.
This is much different from the American high school system in which: an A is 90 to 100, B 80 to 90, etc.
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This is good and bad, on one hand it does prepare them for university. Because university courses are similar in that they are graded on a weighed average. The average is often very low like 40% so that most of the students are “failing”. But since the university profesor can not fail everyone. They just make the good average grade to be what the average of the class actually is. This is similar to the IB in that they actually set the average once they have all the grades.
As tutors we never talk about the grade boundaries with students. We would rather that they keep in mind the old ideas of A, B, C etc. So that they strive to learn more and get a higher percentage of the problems correct.
