*The article has been updated from its printed version to more accurately describe teacher training and preparation.

Although Einstein pushes students to take International Baccalaureate (IB) classes, courses  are not effectively preparing students for their end-of-year exams and for future courses of similar caliber.

Overall, students cited concerns about teacher turnover and IB curriculum updates that they felt led to confusion and lack of preparedness for IB exams.  

IB has many specific requirements, but when teachers are adjusting to new courses and new curriculums, they are too often unable to answer students' questions regarding curriculum, requirements, and the structure of the exam. 

As an IB Sports and Exercise Health Science student, I felt similarly leading up to the exam, as my teacher struggled to explain the structure and specifics of the exam. For this class in particular, part of this struggle came from the change in curriculum, meaning that the structure of the exam also changed, and we were almost the “guinea pigs” for this new format. There was limited information regarding what this exam would entail, and my teacher could only take his best guess as to what the format would be, but it overall left me, along with other students, feeling unprepared for the exam. 

Luisa Farole, a senior who is taking two IB classes (French and Biology), contrasted her experiences in the two classes. 

Regarding IB French, she said, “French has been very straightforward and organized, the curriculum is a lot more theme-based than based on content…” Her time in this class has been more positive, with a teacher who has experience teaching a variety of IB French classes, leading to an organized class with the freedom to have flexibility in pacing and structure.

However, Farole’s experience with IB Biology has been the opposite, with her saying that she feels incredibly unprepared for the exam. To begin with, biology is already a subject that contains difficult topics, but the structure of this class has only made it more difficult to do so. IB updated all science courses this past year as part of their seven-year cycle. 

Anna Taft, another senior taking IB Biology, said, “Even our teacher explained that the amount of time spent in one class period over two years is not sufficient time to cover an HL [higher level] curriculum, especially not with a good understanding.”

If teachers go into these classes feeling like it’s impossible to teach students the material and have them gain a good understanding of it, it creates a completely different environment for the classroom.

With under two months until the final IB Biology exam, we were not even halfway through the curriculum. A large part of this was because it felt impossible to learn all of the curriculum to be taught, which turned the structure of the class into one that reflected those beliefs. It became an environment in which both the teacher and students expected that we weren’t going to make it, and instead of trying to push forward as much as we could, students were left to study half of their curriculum by themselves in the two weeks leading up to the exam. 

Jocelyn Kay, a senior, added to this, discussing the “struggle of taking an IB course…  [with] the ever-changing curricula, especially for science.” Kay takes IB Chemistry and shared a similar struggle to students taking IB Biology, saying that they’re going over important material in just three days, and feels underprepared for the exam as a result.

Students in IB Theatre also discussed feeling unprepared regarding their final projects. In past years, seniors completed asynchronous work during the second year of the course with a focus on the projects that make up the IB Theatre exam grade. However, this year was different. Instead, the first half of their senior year was spent doing assignments unrelated to the final projects, which were then crammed into the second half of the year. 

Part of this came from switching teachers midway through the two-year course, with current seniors taking their first year with Peter Smeallie and their second with Rachel Herman after Smeallie retired. With Herman working to find her footing while not yet completing IB training, students struggled to feel prepared and were unsatisfied with their final projects. 

IB Physics also struggled with a teacher change, leaving students with a brand-new, first-year teacher for the second year of the course. To accommodate this change, students had to complete their Internal Assessment, a final project usually completed in the second year, in a short period of time during the first year of the course. Furthermore, Kay, who also takes IB Physics, shared that students were expected to know certain things in their second year, but the complications from the first year inhibited her (and others) from doing so.