Recently American colleges and universities become more familiar with IB system and tend to highly honor this system. if a student can receive a IB diploma, that would certainly be helpful since not all high schools students in IB schools are receiving the diploma. At the same time, it would not hurt if you work on some of AP exams and get high scores since schools with IB tend not to offer AP courses and students can take their own AP tests.
If you are applying very specific majors such engineering or Pre-Med, I would certainly suggest you to take some of additional advanced courses or exams such as AP exams. However, a student can have other options such as specific American college courses through online or summer terms at colleges. The most important thing is to prove that a student is capable to manage a college level of works and that can be shown through various ways such as APs, college courses, internships, research opportunities and other interesting works.
Recently, US colleges have become more familiar with the IB curriculum. Both the IB and the AP are evaluated similarly. Colleges are more interested in how a student has performed within the curriculum of their high school. For example, colleges would like to see a student excel in the harder classes at school, regardless of whether they are studying the IB or AP curriculum. However, the difference comes from getting credits for the courses. Some schools may give less credit for IB than AP since (a) the US colleges don’t know the IB system as well, and (b) students under AP may have more background knowledge that is required by a certain course.
The tuition for top independent boarding school in the US is generally around US45-52,000. Some schools, like Phillips Exeter Academy, have large endowments, and they will subsidize the students’ tuition. For example, the tuition at Exeter is US46,000, but the actual cost per student is closer to US55-60,000. The difference in tuition between day and boarding is generally around US10,000.
If you are looking to apply for financial aid or scholarship, you may not want to if you are not a US or Canadian citizen. Although many of the top schools are need blind (which means that they will accept the student before they decide whether to give money to subsidize the tuition), because of the bad economy, it will affect the acceptance rate of your child.
To factor in all the cost of going to a boarding school, it would be:
1. Tuition (room and board is included)
2. Pocket Money
3. Insurance
4. Transportation (plane ticket, buses to the airport, etc.)
5. Books (this should run around US1,000 per year, although I have found that it is generally more, closer to US2-3,000 per year as my children likes to buy books other than school books to read)
6. Room and board during holidays if your child doesn’t go back to China
我是美国大学理事部认证的AP教师和IBO认证的IB教师(方向:数学和物理)。严格说来,AP和IB是有很大不同的。IB是为期两年的program,留学生来美国时间短的话,选IB program是相当困难的,因为IB program毕业证书课程要求学生修多达六门不同方向的课程,而每一门课的内容都远比AP课程要广泛。比如说IB数学(高级)要求学生除掌握几乎所有的AP微积分BC的内容外,还包括代数,几何,三角,矢量,矩阵(明年开始删除),概率,统计,参变量,极坐标等。而且考试时间也不同。一门AP考试一次四小时完成。而一门IB考试则有paper 1, paper 2 and paper 3,分在三个不同的时间考。此外,IB还有internal assessment,占总成绩的20% 到25%。最大的不同是IB还有CAS的要求,也就是课外活动的要求, EE和TOK. EE和TOK要求英语写作的水平较高,这也是留学生头疼的。