Demystifying IB Predicted Grades

Описание: Over the past several months, ACES Member schools have been reaching out with some urgency for help to better understand the difference between the final IB grades that we predict for our students, and the surprising final results they sometimes receive.

The truth is we often over predict, and rarely under predict.

In the survey sent out to Members in November, Some of you responded that you felt that there is a conscious intent by the IB to lower the grades on the high end, where predicted 6’s and 7’s end up being 5’s and 6’s.

Other members felt that there tend to be larger discrepencies in certain subject areas. At my own IB Continuum school here in Ostrava, we were scratching our heads a bit over our HL Chemistry, and Art.

Many of our schools feel that they have a difficult time balancing between their efforts to encourage students by providing more optimistic predicted grades, only to have to deal with the fallout afterwards when the grades were lower, and a university offer may have been withdrawn as a result.

Whether you are new to the practice of predicted grades, or have been doing it for years, I believe that today’s ACES Connections will help us all to tackle head-on the vexing challenge of Demystifying Predicted IB Grades.

We will begin with Fabrizia Flynn, Head of Assessment, Principles and Practice at the IB, who will lead us through what predicted grades are and are not, and provide some background on why certain results are as they are. Fabrizia will address several of our ACES Members' general questions on assessment, and then she and her team will address School-specific and data-sensitive questions for individual ACES members by direct email.

We will then spend some time with Elizabeth Zeller, Global Recognition Manager at the IB Global Centre, The Hague, She will lead us through some of the IB resources available for supporting schools in predicting grades, and reflect on how different universities may use predicted grades across various regions.

And finally, Keith Layman, Career and Higher Education Counsellor at the International School of Dusseldorf will take us on his school's journey from a 'best-case-scenario' approach for determining predicted grades to a more rigorous, evidence-based, data-driven process that is transparent, honest and supportive of the students, the staff and the families.