What's the IB?

Four schools in this directory offer the International Baccalaureate, and it may be the least understood credential in San Francisco. We knew almost nothing about it when we started this process. It deserves better, because it's one of the most impressive academic programs a high school can run.

How the diploma works

The IB is a diploma program founded in Switzerland in 1968 and now taught in thousands of schools worldwide. The version that matters for high school is the Diploma Programme, a two-year course of study spanning junior and senior year. Where AP is a menu of individual courses, the IB Diploma is a package. A student takes six subjects at once, one from each area: literature, a second language, a social science, a lab science, math, and the arts or a second pick from the others. Three run at higher level, three at standard. Assessment involves more sustained writing and less multiple choice than the AP model, with work graded by examiners around the world.

What sets the diploma apart is its core, three requirements every full-diploma student everywhere completes. Theory of Knowledge is a course in how we know what we know, asking what counts as evidence for a historian versus a chemist and how sure either can be. The Extended Essay is a 4,000-word independent research paper on a question the student chooses. And CAS (creativity, activity, service) requires a life outside the classroom. The core is why IB graduates tend to arrive at college already knowing how to run a long project on their own.

Who offers it here

Convent and Stuart Hall run the diploma as a two-year elective program; classmates who don't pursue it take AP and college-prep courses instead. International was the fourth school in the country authorized to offer the full diploma and teaches IB rather than AP, with bilingual diploma options. Lycée Français teaches the IB on its International Track, which requires no French to enter, alongside a French Track that leads to the French Bac. Colleges know the credential well, read it as demanding, and credit it much as they credit AP, generously at every UC and with the same caps at the most selective privates. The AP guide has what that's worth in practice. And because it's the same diploma everywhere, it travels. Universities abroad read IB results directly, and International's recent classes have gone to St Andrews and Bocconi as readily as to Berkeley.

Who it suits

A student who likes writing, research, and carrying a project across months, and who wants breadth, since the six-subject structure means keeping a language, a science, and math through senior year. A student who'd rather go all-in on one subject and drop the rest can find the same structure confining. That's not a flaw in the student or the program, just a fit question, and it's the kind worth asking before the transcript starts, not after.