Attention all IB students (and their friends)
As you’ll be aware, you or your peers will have sat Physics paper one and two on Friday May 6th 2016. If you were in the exam hall, you probably know first hand what a massacre it was. You might be one of the many people who came out of that exam traumatized, laughing hysterically, or bawling your eyes out because your entire future rides on this exam. If you don’t take physics or are a 2017 graduate, you may have witnessed your friends dissociative and on the verge of mental breakdown. Now there is something you can do to make the IBO finally speak out about the unspeakable cruelty of a disproportionately difficult exam. All you have to do is take one minute to sign a petition backed by students world wide and which will be sent to Director General Dr Siva Kumari.
You can find the petition here: IB Physics Examination May 2016
According to the IBO’s May 2015 statistical bulletin there were nearly 70′000 full IB Diploma candidates. Assuming this years figures are similar, as of this moment more than 10% of students have already signed the petition. Let’s bump that number up even more so that we cannot be ignored. If you didn’t take the exam, below are some reasons to support the students who did and at the bottom of this post you can find some of the many comments on the petition.
Some of the main issues with the exam were the number and type of questions and the problems resulting from the new point distribution system that made the whole exam a race against time, which may cost brilliant students their university places. Many people with predicted 7s and offers to Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Imperial and many more top universities are going to suffer because we are a minority among university applicants and therefore admissions offices won’t look into possible wide scale difficulties with our programme. The IBO has to stop using as guinea pigs, to tell us that it is absolutely normal to sacrifice your mental and physical health at such a young age so that they can continue to profit from the good reputation their hardworking students have awarded them with. We’ve spent money on these exams, on two frustrating years of constant deadlines, uni applications and related exams, and multiple expensive books. We’ve spent countless hours studying instead of sleeping, seeing friends, exercising, or basically any other “fun” activity. Our class motto? “The IB doesn’t care about your feelings.”
I’ve watched one of my best friends have a complete mental breakdown right in the middle of the exam. Top students are worried about passing, when physics Paper 2 boundaries are already notoriously low. People are crying their eyes out in school hallways, frantically searching for the little box on one of the 500 pages in the box entire exam questions were about. The IB has repeatedly failed to provide adequate physics exams judging by the current boundaries, and somehow this year was a belly flop even compared to the worst past exams.
But hey, don’t listen to me. Take the word of all these people who lived right through it:
Again the petition can be found here.
Tagging some people in hopes of giving this a signal boost:
@living-the-ib-life @jusongb @fesquishety @ib-student-99 @artuhmes @captain-awesome-socks @obliviousswede @ib-procrastinating @ib-hacks @shit-ib-students-do
