U-Va. students protest lack of credits for IB courses

On some days when Alexis Robertson was in the heavy-duty International Baccalaureate program at South Lakes High School in Fairfax County, she arrived at 7 a.m. and didn't leave until 8 p.m.

The 4,000-word IB paper she wrote was longer and more detailed than anything she has done as a freshman at the University of Virginia. She passed six college-level IB exams, did 150 hours of community service and received the IB diploma, one of the highest honors bestowed by U.S. high schools, along with her regular diploma.

Yet U-Va. gave her only nine college credits. She said a friend who had a similar load of Advanced Placement courses received 39 credits and has started taking classes in her major.

That means AP is better than IB, right? No. I have written books about both. Although IB and AP both add electrifying challenges to typically limp high school course catalogues, IB is somewhat better because of its writing requirement and deeper exams, which do not have multiple-choice questions.

But students at U-Va. and elsewhere are finding that the nation's finest colleges are dumb and deceptive about IB. They openly discriminate against students such as Robertson, despite having no data to support their rules and no interest in changing them.

This is my fifth year investigating IB credit policies at more than a dozen universities in the Washington region and others elsewhere. When I ask their spokespeople why they give more credit for good scores on AP tests than for similar IB tests, they say they don't know.

The few times I have been able to reach the professors who make these rules, they usually say: "Well, some committee made those decisions many years ago. I don't know when we will have a chance to review them."

U-Va.'s rules on IB credit are among the worst in the country, and students are organizing to change them. This might be because Northern Virginia has one of the highest concentrations of IB high schools.

Lauren Carman, a junior who graduated from Edison High School in Fairfax County, said the IB protesters "are rather outraged." Matthew Allen, a sophomore, recalled spending more than $80 to take an AP calculus test his senior year at Robert E. Lee High because his high grade on a similar IB test got no credit.

Julia Hardcastle, a sophomore who received an IB diploma at George C. Marshall High School, said, "I was horrified at my U-Va. orientation to find that I would be receiving zero credit for all my hard work."

U-Va. and most colleges give some credit for good scores on IB higher-level exams for two-year courses. But they rarely give credit for good scores on IB standard-level exams, unless the student has received an IB diploma.

U-Va. gives credit for good scores on exams for one-year AP courses but none for good scores on exams for any one-year IB standard-level course, although a 2007 Thomas B. Fordham Institute study found AP and IB standard-level courses nearly identical in rigor and content.

U-Va. spokeswoman Carol Wood said: "College faculty make informed decisions about the credit to be awarded, regularly verifying their judgments by feedback provided from student performance." That is a standard college line, but like most other schools that discriminate against IB, the university has no data.

Now that the College Board is deepening its AP courses and tests to look more like IB, it might be a good time for U-Va. and schools like it to make their credit rules not quite so stupid and for U-Va. to admit that the IB student rebellion there is its fault.