Why Are IB Seniors Crying All the Time?
Celena Shen (G12)
As a senior in IB currently under pressure from school and colleges, Celena has decided to indulge in her senioritis by writing this article. As senior citizens of the high school ecosystem we are here to relay our knowledge of the IB and express to everyone why seniors always seem to be dead inside
Walking past the senior lounge as an underclassman, I never understood what I saw. The lounge, a space perfect for quiet studying, is always filled with tables full of cookie crumbs, pillows stained by tears, and couches full of snoring seniors. It was always loud: shouts of desperation, joy, and confusion. With such a condensed mixture of emotions in a single room, the transitions between each stage of grief have played out before me multiple times.
5 Stages of Grief
The 5 stages of grief, often used to illustrate the rollercoaster of emotions that one experiences with ending relationships and losing loved ones–– IB seniors have lost their sanity and will to live.
Shock and Denial
Finals week in Junior year is nothing compared to the first few months that come in senior year. For most, it takes a few days to adjust to having a summative every day, but once you pass the one-week benchmark, it is important to have transitioned your mindset to be prepared for the workload. IB is about survival of the fittest. If by then you are still caught up in denying this unwanted reality instead of studying, there's no way of catching up. It is here we see the phenomena of the IB students list decreasing. We can only infer that they were the unfortunate ones who could not pull through this challenging time and have either dropped out or been kicked out.
Anger
Seniors are always angry. We may hide it well, but we are always angry at something. This may be because you just found out study leaves don't resume until after October break, a group of underclassmen have taken the lunch table you have sat at for the past three years, or your Chem IA is due on your birthday so the first 4 hours of that day will certainly be spent by your desks typing away. Most may get stuck at this stage, but at some point, we realize that being angry takes up too much time, and we should be studying instead.
Bargaining
As an underclassman, I used to wonder: "seniors must be great friends with all their teachers; they're always having conversations." As an upperclassman, I must say: "no, they are just bargaining." In the classroom, hallways, IT service center, lunch line, waiting to check out at Jenny Wang, these are all great places to have conversations that involve bargaining with teachers for better predicted grades. At this point, seniors have begun to take direct action and are so desperate that they will do anything.
Depression
If you don't get stuck on stage two, you probably will get stuck here. I don't think this stage needs much explanation because through observation, it's quite clear that all seniors are either mad or depressed (likely both).
Acceptance
Out of all 5 stages, this is the one where I am skeptical as to whether it ever happens to IB students. Those who make it to stage five are either:
1. At the point where acceptance is their only way of coping or
2. Not human. Periodt. They have evolved to become more superior and are too smart for the rest of us.
Targeting Students
The first to blame for this pain is the students themselves.
EE
The EE is basically another IA or HL essay. Only longer. With a whole year to write, most juniors will take a glance at the calendar and wonder what all the fuss is about. However, it is because of how much time you are given, and the lack of acknowledgment you give that makes the EE a looming threat.
This ticking time bomb will undoubtedly give you the opportunity to practice and eventually be able to write an essay with an ample amount of words without much given time. The EE will ultimately teach students how to become better procrastinators. Sitting at a desk with your computer screen staring back at you, you are able to race against time again and again, being able to submit your work as the second hand of your clock strikes 8:00am. For many, this will be an experience that one knows all too well. But unlike many other tasks, the EE is utterly important and requires a great deal of planning and thinking. By the end of this, students will have the impressive skills to complete work at an insanely quick pace. While this is a skill that many desire, the content produced is almost garbage.
Because the EE is disregarded so often and completed over such a long period of time, it's easy to lose your train of thoughts, resulting in the reorganization and writing of your paragraphs, trying to remember why you had written 1000 words on the psychological background research on a topic that doesn't even appear in the book of your English EE. It is around halfway through your essay, that you begin to question your intellectual abilities for picking such a boring or challenging topic. After submitting your draft barely on time, you proudly stare at the dropbox in Managebac but realize that you have submitted draft number 10 instead of 11.
So essentially, the problem with the EE is that students are given too much time. Of course, our poor time management skills are also to blame.
Targeting Teachers
In these intensive few months, students lack the support that they need. While many teachers do try their best to help manage students' stress, I'm sure that all seniors know the few who don't.
Questionable Advice: IA
It's ironic, really, that teachers ask for nongeneric topics when their advice is almost always generic. They tell students repeatedly that IA topics must not be too generic but also must not be unique to a point where no previous research exists. Topics must not be too difficult "the writing and analysis are what matters," they would say, but also must not be too simple such that we have done the same problems during class. At the end of the day, students have searched through the whole internet, asked for advice on their Instagram stories, and contacted every outside source they have, but still won't have a topic. When asking teachers for suggestions, some would wave you off and say, "have you read the exemplars?"... yes, we have; "it really shouldn't be this hard"... no, it really is this hard.
No Point in Wellness Weekends
I think at this point, the whole high school knows that wellness weekends are a myth. Teachers always find a way around them, whether that is assigning extra work, giving 'optional' work, or making work due earlier. However, for IB seniors, on top of the normal workload, most assignments are completed over weeks, even months; hence, a no "homework" weekend just means more work before or after the weekend.
Targeting IB
- The actual academics are hard af -
Finally, we get to the actual academics. The classes are deceiving, especially Psychology and English. It's those that make you wonder, "why do we never get homework?" "do I even need to study?" that hit you hard during tests the most. Everything seems chill and straightforward during class, but when you stare down at your test paper, your mind goes blank, and you question how the course was supposed to help prepare you for this test. To give some more context on these written tests, I read online that "it takes a person around 2 hours to type a 600 word essay" (Davis); IB students need to handwrite two 600+ word analytical essays in 2 hours for an English A HL paper 1. For even more context, it takes about 30 minutes of nonstop handwriting to write 600 words (Davis), so that's an hour of continuous writing for a single paper 1. Therefore, after a paper 1, students are often seen holding their wrists as they walk out of the exam room.
The worst is yet to come, however. A few weeks later, you now have to sit through a class where the teacher correctly analyzes the two texts where you realize all the points you missed and all the marks you didn't hit, so you already know you failed, and you die a little more every time a new point is mentioned. Not many make it through this grueling process; some leave the room in tears, or zone out to the void of utter shame.
My parents used to tell me that my public speaking skills will come as I grow and get more practice. Assuming that their promises are true, the only acceptable explanation for my disappointing oral grades must be that the IB curriculum is not fit for an average 15-19-year-old student. Heck, my dad can't even deliver a 10-minute oral with 5 minutes of answering impromptu questions and he's in his 50s.
For the lucky few getting their Bilingual Diploma, congratulations, you need to memorize two whole books for paper 2. And, as an HL language A student, it is also possible to have paper 1, paper 2, IO, HL essay, and an EE, which is equivalent to around 10,000 English words worth of writing or around 15,000 Chinese characters; good luck to the unlucky few.
Based on my experiences with psychology exams, because it is impossible to predict which SAQs or ERQ prompts will appear on the test, students have two study options. They either have the choice of playing it safe and memorizing nearly 50 studies or risking everything and only memorizing the 15 most important, and even then, you still have to spend hours remembering the key components and concepts for each.
Personal Engagement
At this point, the reasons behind our suffering should be pretty clear. But not only do we need to endure such pain and agony, but we also need to show that we are enjoying it. 2/24 marks are dedicated solely to personal engagement in IAs. After hesitantly choosing a topic, you now have to pretend that it is the most exciting thing in the world. I don't know about you, but that just seems unfair. It is difficult to understand the concepts behind combustion enthalpies, it is even more difficult to convince someone why finding the enthalpy of combustion of homologous alcohols through burning them one by one for ten minutes while recording their temperature is a creative personal interest of yours, a hobby if you may.
(Courtesy of Reddit)
CAS
Other than the academics, students are also forced to be rounded people. And this is maintained by force, I mean if your CAS isn't up to date or doesn't meet the benchmark, you will fail IB. Nerds can't be just smart; they have to be creative; creatives can't just read and draw; they have to be active; IB students can't just work in school; they have to provide service for others outside of school. While some may say that IB is trying to raise students with good morals and lifestyles, by making CAS a mandatory task, it completely disregards the whole point of having a healthy lifestyle by choice and contradicts the very meaning of “volunteer work.”
Tok Grading System
By senior year, IB students can answer "what is knowledge?" and "the difference between truth and fact," but no one will be able to answer "what is TOK?". The grading system is out of 10, but not only are there no individual strands, but the general rubric is also in two-mark increments, so it's hard to know whether you even reached each strand. When asked the grade an example TOK essay, everyone gave a different grade, and no one got the actual given grade. The subjectivity of the grading system makes it extremely hard to know whether you have done well or even why you did well.
Conclusion
Based on the consensual agreement of my friend group and myself, many IB seniors have concluded that we are stupid. However, it is important to realize that even model students who follow the instructions may fail IB. Although gruesome and not made for all students, the intensity of the IBDP program is something that does prepare a student for the future, whether that is how to handle tremendous amounts of stress or knowing when to give up. Nevertheless, I’d like for Ib to consider amending their curriculum. After all, we are high schoolers trying to live our own lives. Why are we being asked to do things that we should learn in college in order to get into colleges?
(Courtesy of Reddit)
Citation:
Davis, Ben. “How Long Does It Take to Write a 600 Word Essay?” Mvorganizing.org, 1 May 2021, https://www.mvorganizing.org/how-long-does-it-take-to-write-a-600-word-essay/.
“R/IBO - I Haven't Done Cas Yet 😭.” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/q5o94u/i_havent_done_cas_yet/.
