university questions

[Master Oz]

If I pass my IB really well can I go striaght to second year university?

Has anyone done it?

[Sandwich]

Maybe it depends on how universities work in your country, but it's not possible anywhere that I know of! IB isn't advanced enough to = University, even just the first year.

[Forester]

In the USA, IB HL subjects can be used as credits. If you do 4 HL, and your university offers credits for all four of your HLs, then you can go straight into second year. That only applies for some universities, not many I assume.

[__inthemaking]

I doubt there are many places where you can. In Canada for sure you couldn't because a first year student usually takes on a full courseload of 5 courses/semester so unless you took 5 HL subjects and received credits for all of them, you wouldn't have enough credits to skip your entire first year.

I wouldn't advise you to do so even if it were possible. First year university is as much as learning about lecture styles, how TAs want labs to be done, how much time you're going to need to study for midterms/finals etc as it is about the material.

[Dark Matter]

I know that the university I am going into allows you to use either SL or HL credits from IB to be used for first year credits, so then you can go into second year courses. Then each mark for IB would translate into A+ (a 7), A (a 6), and etc. However some IB courses don't have an equilvalent university course. Example, Mandarin can't be used as a university credit. This is just from what the one unversity I am looking at though, you would have to check if the university you plan to go to allows this.

However after talking to a lot of people they all suggested taking the courses again so that you learn the additional information. Although some courses like English would probably be easily done if you use your credit for first year and go into second year.

[Ashika]

I did it, sort of.

But I still took first year courses in my first year and I'll be taking 2nd year courses in my 2nd year... the only difference is in my third year I'll be taking 3rd and 4th year courses... and then I'm done!

It really just depends on the program you're doing and the school you're applying for.

All my courses from IB were used for electives (2 history; 2 french), pre-requisites (2 intro chem courses... i took the filler chem course designed for AP/IB students at my uni... teaches us whatever we didn't cover and how to do uni chem labs) or required courses (2 english courses) and for my program (8/10 courses) and I'm taking 2 electives (history; political science) this summer to make up for the last 2 I need to finish.

If your school is IB friendly, then do it! Who doesn't want to pay one less year of tuition?

[Hyperbole]

Aberdeen University, in Scotland, allows you to go into the second year if your IB grades are good. I'm not entirely sure what "good" is here, but I have a feeling it's in the range of 36 or so. On the other hand, most of their undergraduate programmes are five years long, so that would merely reduce your study time to what it would be in most other places.

But as has been expressed earlier, I don't think skipping the first year of uni sounds like such a good idea. I wouldn't do it myself.