Was the IB Worth It? I Asked My Own Daughter.

I’ve coached hundreds of students through the IB. I’ve also sat on the other side of it, as the parent of a daughter who went through it herself, and honestly those are two very different vantage points.

The question I keep asking her

Now that she’s at a very good university in the UK, doing the course of her dreams, I sometimes ask her, “Do you think it was worth it? Was all that stress, all that IB, actually worth it?” Honestly, I think her first year at university has been an absolute breeze for her. She’s found it easy to score, and I like to take a little credit for having taught her English myself. But more than the essay practice, I think the rigour of the IB taught her to be independent and manage her own responsibilities through a hectic workload. At university, she’s had to navigate new friendships, living alone, household responsibilities, loneliness and her own decision-making. I think all that stress has probably hardened her in a good way and, more importantly, given her confidence in her own ability to navigate life.

What I think the IB gets right

Choosing your own Internal Assessment(IA) topics and making them real, doing your own university-level research for the Extended Essay(EE), and developing an expansive mindset through six subjects, Theory of Knowledge, and the Extended Essay can all feel like a lot of pressure at the beginning. But this breadth of study forces you to develop more tools for your future and to think more widely. Even a language you may have hated being forced to study, especially in the International Baccalaureate(IB), is not simply about grammar and vocabulary. It is about beliefs, values, culture, systems, and global fields of inquiry such as identity, justice, and politics. That exposure can only deepen your interest in understanding other cultures, and that is valuable no matter what field you eventually go into.

This is exactly why I teach English with such passion, and why we’ve been so successful with our English modules specifically. It’s about expanding the mindset to actually process information, to read and look deeper than the superficial plot, which is what we tend to consume a lot of on Netflix and other platforms now. It’s about understanding the human condition, seeing ourselves in other people and other cultures, and not seeing our challenges as failures. Even something like Antigone, written 2500 years ago, is a phenomenal thing to study because it shows students they are not alone on this journey. So many people have traversed this path across culture and across time, and the human condition really does remain the same. I think that message, and learning to process and articulate it, is probably one of the best gifts we can give our youth as they go into a difficult time of AI, where it’s their humaneness that’s actually going to get them through life.

What I think schools get wrong

I see so many schools cramming everything into grade 12, when kids have only just gone back and everything hits them at once. IAs, EE, university applications, predicted grades, huge amounts of pressure all at once. I really believe timing is important, and the bulk of the work needs to shift earlier into grade 11. I think students cruise through grade 11 and then get a very rude awakening in grade 12, which just adds unnecessary stress.

I also think some compulsory modules are missing. Financial planning, decision making, life skills like meditation and reflection, understanding how money actually works. We can’t deny how important finance is in our lives, and I think we’ve built some very unhealthy habits around measuring our self worth by the money we’ve earned or saved.

The part that worries me most

Predicted IB scores can feel life-defining and course-defining to a seventeen-year-old, and I don’t think that much emphasis should be placed on them. I feel we train young people to measure success in life by whether they got the 45, got into that university, or secured that salary. And that can be deeply disappointing, especially now, when those markers may not be so easy to achieve or may not come at the time we think they should.

So, was it worth it?

Yes. Not because of the final grade. It’s worth it because of what surviving something genuinely demanding, with the right support around you, teaches a young person about their own resilience. That’s the part that stays with them long after the score itself has stopped mattering to anyone.