IB Scores in Florida vs. Australia- an Earth-Shattering Discrepancy

This is about something I've discovered, along with a detailed explanation of why I think it's a significant discovery worth sharing. This may not be the right place to share this, but I don't have a Substack blog or anything so I don't have a better place to post it. For years, I have compiled a large collection of stats related to high-achieving high school students in the United States, focusing heavily on National Merit semifinalists. For those who don't know what that means, in the United States, there is a test called the PSAT (essentially a practice SAT) that students take in the fall of their 11th grade year, and the top scorers in each state get named as semifinalists in "National Merit," a national scholarship program. There are around 17,000 semifinalists per year out of a national year cohort of a little over 4 million students, so around 0.4% are National Merit semifinalists. A full list of National Merit semifinalists is published, and this is probably the best publicly available resource for analyzing the characteristics of America's top academic achievers. About 1.4% of the national cohort is at least a National Merit "commended scholar," based on a single national cutoff score. Although there are clearly some students who would qualify who do not take the PSAT, this seems to be a very small percentage, so National Merit semifinalists and commended scholars roughly equate to the top 0.4% of students in each state and top 1.5% of the national year cohort, respectively, by some academic measurement. More recently, I've started looking into similar statistics from Australia. In Australia, students within each state are ranked, largely based on standardized tests, in a metric called the ATAR, which is essentially a percentile. University admissions in Australia are pretty much determined by ATAR. The ATAR is reported in increments of 0.05, so the top 0.05% of the students have an ATAR of 99.95, the next 0.05% have an ATAR of 99.90, and so on. Notably, these percentiles are based on the entire year cohort, including those who don't make it to the end of Year 12, so the average ATAR is quite a bit higher than 50. Based on this, and the percentages above for National Merit, I've been operating under the assumption that an ATAR of at least 99.6 is equivalent to National Merit semifinalist and an ATAR of at least 98.5 or so is equivalent to National Merit commended. For the most part, the ATAR is based on tests not taken in America, so there is no direct comparison to ascertain how high the National Merit cutoff would be in New South Wales, for example, if it were a US state. However, there's one exception to the above: International Baccalaureate (IB) tests. These tests are globally standardized based on a global curriculum. Students studying this curriculum get a score based on a set of standardized exams (one in each core academic subject plus a few others), and the maximum possible score is 45. Notably, in Australia, IB scores are converted to ATARs, which gives a rough gauge of what percentile in the year cohort each score corresponds to. In particular, the 98.5 equivalent for National Merit commended corresponds to an IB score of 42/45. Although only a small percentage of schools participate in IB in Australia, many students at these schools achieve 42/45 or higher (see here for an example). Back to the United States, public school districts in many parts of Florida steer their highest-achieving students into the IB curriculum. Not a whole lot is publicly available on the internet regarding IB exam scores at Florida high schools, but one school (the highest-performing high school in a large Florida district) does have some information available online. This school had well over 100 National Merit semifinalists and commended students in the IB graduating classes of 2018-2025, but according to its school profiles had even a single student with a 42+ IB score only once during this time (see here for some of the data). This suggests about a 100-to-1 ratio, based on these metrics, of top 1.5% academic achievers by American standards to top 1.5% academic achievers by Australian students, a huge gap. Here are three possible explanations for this phenomenon: A very unfavorable IB-to-ATAR conversion in Australia. However, the top comment here, for example, suggests otherwise. Students in Australia study harder for IB exams. This is almost certainly a factor, given that Australian students need every possible point for university admissions while Florida students often have senioritis when taking the exams. Still, the 100-1 ratio seems too large to explain away using this factor. It's not as if no Florida students are incentivized to study hard for their IB exams for college credit (especially at Florida schools) and making sure they get the coveted IB diploma. It's not all that different from AP-oriented curricula in the United States, where plenty of students get fives on senior-year AP exams despite widespread senioritis. Although this is not a perfect analogy because the SAT is more of an aptitude-based test, there were plenty of students getting scores on the SAT in the 1970s and 80s that would convert to near-perfect scores with the current scaling, even though there was far less test prep and fewer students taking AP-level classes. Going back to National Merit, my mom's graduating class had six National Merit semifinalists, and this was in a low-SES small city where her school had no AP-level classes and it didn't occur to anyone to study for the SAT or take it more than once. There is a very large gap between the 99th percentile of students in Australia and in the United States. Australia definitely has some advantages in this regard (e.g. its largest minority group is Asian), but if this were large enough to drive the 100-to-1 ratio it seems it would be more well established. Furthermore, Australia, for example, would (despite its much smaller population) likely have a depth of talent pool to choose from for its International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) team rivaling or exceeding the United States, which is clearly not the case. SUBMISSION STATEMENTS: Link 1: Results for an Australian high school showing a large number of perfect and near-perfect IB scores. From the school's website. Link 2: Results for a Florida high school showing a lack of perfect and near-perfect IB scores despite strong National Merit representation. Taken from the school's website. Link 3: A Reddit thread showing evidence of a sentiment undermining one of the explanations for the discovery described in the post. TL;DR: A Florida IB program has had over 100 National Merit qualifiers over the past eight years, but possibly only one student achieve an IB score equating to an equivalent percentile of academic achievement in Australia. submitted by /u/countyguy1141 [link] [comments]