How to quote IB grades on my CV

[Tony Petrovik]

Hi guys, i was wondering how to use the IB grades on a CV, does each subject count seperatly or together, school says it is all one qualification but surely i cant just write on my CV "IB x amount of points in total" so what do you think you would have to write?

[~Lc~]

I've gone with "IB Diploma, total: 36 points" and then if there are any subjects which are relevant (like a job requires an Arabic speaker) I would list Arabic Higher Level 6, English A1 Standard level 7.

[TykeDragon]

Why not just write out your subjects, points in each and total? I mean, (sorry if you aren't UK and this means nothing) but I don't think we write GCSE: 5 A*s, 5 As, 1B or anything, we write English - A*, History - A*, Japanese - A* etc etc... it's good to show what you got in what.

When I first clicked this thread I thought it was going to be more 'how do we concisely explain the IB on our CV because employers looking for a letter grade of A*-E will see 'level 4' or 'level 7' and may not know wtf it is. So what I was gonna say to go with was English - 6 out of a possible 7 or something, and at the end, say, 37/45 points.

[stitch11694]

I had the same question actually. I've just been saying 7/7, 6/7, 5/7, and so on so forth

[Arrowhead]

What I tend to do is is the following (directly copied from my CV):

2008-2010: X School in Switzerland

International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP). 41/45 (632 UCAS Points - equivalent)

English A1 HL: 6; History HL: 7; Economics HL: 7; French Ab Initio SL: 7; Maths SL: 6; Environmental Systems SL: 5;

Theory of Knowledge and Extended Essay: 3

[Sandwich]

I did much the same as Arrowhead, but without putting on the UCAS points (by the logic that they mean very little to ME in terms of what's high and what's low, so employers probably wouldn't either) and I put X/7 so like 6/7, 7/7 and so on. Depends what you're applying for, but bets are high that they have no clue what the hell the IB is and '6', '7' and so on mean nothing to them without a denominator. Anything 'code' like that e.g. HL English A1 I would write as Higher English Literature so they could understand a bit more of what it was. My Extended Essay was my 'dissertation' and CAS was 'community service', both of which are broadly true and look better on a CV than unintelligible EE and CAS.

I was doing my CV to get a summer job, research placement and that sort of stuff though so I could be pretty definite it wasn't going to anybody who was going to know what any of it meant. One of my friends also wrote translation grades next to hers saying what 'A' Level grade they were equivalent to, but I dunno how necessary that really is. Either way, I think you need to help people understand what your grades mean because honestly nobody does unless they also did the IB.