International Baccalaureate - Blog Posts

Genuinely crashing out right now cuz I spent hours for days on end doing my HL essay for my senior IB English class. I worked so damn hard analyzing everything, typing it out, editing back to back, and I turned it in just before the deadline only to realize it fucking slipped my mind to attach my AI detected screenshot to prove that I made it. So I emailed my teacher, only to realize that holy fuck, I forgot to make citations too!

I rarely ever cry over school anymore but bro, it's 12:23 AM. I was literally dipping in and out of consciousness just to wake up and turn it in before the deadline only to realize I fucked up, and I gotta finish another essay, and I gotta wake up at 6:30 AM for the bus, and then I gotta tutor motherfuckers in the morning before my IB English class at 8:31 AM, take a test, and read 30 pages for Wednesday. Like... I'm literally sobbing right now over this shit and idk who or where to vent to. Anyway, James Sunderland.

I learned today that the International Baccalaureate organization (the ones who run the IB tests) consider the topics lists for their courses to be copyrighted and confidential. They won't share them without a signed release.

I'm genuinely offended by this. I don't know how the fuck you're supposed to evaluate or understand the program without knowing what topics it covers! (They'll share the topics list with me, specifically, in the course of evaluating the test for my university; but I have to sign a release, and have to promise not to share them with colleagues, because they want my colleagues to sign the same release.)

And there's, like, no point to this. It's not a major secret what the topics a calculus course should cover are. (And sure, they do some stats and matrices or something too, and that's all the added info.) I think you can't even legally "copyright" the contents of these lists, because it's factual information and that's not copyrightable.

I'm really seriously tempted to issue an official recommendation to my university to stop giving any credit for IB tests until this policy gets reversed. If they won't freely share information on the program and the test, we'll have to assume that it's valueless and shouldn't earn credit.

(My only hesitation to that is it's probably a quixotic quest that would just hassle some innocent IB students. But if I can get a bunch of other departments to sign on I'll absolutely do it; IB can't sustain that policy if universities stop rolling over for it.)