The International Baccalaureate’s longest-lived and most rigorous iteration, the Diploma Program, remains widely misunderstood and under-covered in the U.S., even among those of us who work in and around advanced education. That’s a problem for a program that exists in almost 1,000 high schools and educates nearly 100,000 teenagers. To help change that, at least for myself, I agreed to spend a chilly, overcast day in November meeting with administrators, teachers, and students at Ann Arbor Huron High School, which houses the only IB Diploma Program in my city. I left the visit appreciating what the program does for students, wishing it were more widespread, and lamenting that it wasn’t an option for me many years ago.
The Diploma Program, or “DP,” is a rigorous, broad, two-year high school program that culminates in externally assessed exams and a diploma recognized by universities in many countries, including the U.S. It also forces students to do more than specialize in one lane. They take subjects across many realms (languages, humanities, sciences, math, arts, electives), while also going deeper in selected higher-level courses. Schools that offer the Diploma Program may also open its individual courses to other students willing to dip their toes into these waters. That’s what Huron does.
Ann Arbor Huron High School is a large, comprehensive public institution—about 1,700 students—and has the full ecosystem you’d expect: AP courses, athletics, arts, clubs, and a student body the school describes as one of the most diverse in Michigan. It’s also built an IB continuum that’s not confined to a tiny subset of super-students. [1] Roughly half of students in 11th and 12th grade take at least one IB course and exam, and dozens pursue full completion of the Diploma Program.
It’s easy to misread this flavor of the IB in the American imagination as an elite private-school brand or a gated program inside public schools that serves a small, pre-selected group. But it’s often much broader, including Huron’s version. Any student there who wants to take an individual DP course or enter the full Diploma Program can do so—and the school works with them to ensure they’re successful. The school does this well, reporting that just two or three students drop out of the full program each year.
One of the most compelling parts of my visit was how the faculty and students I spoke with described the difference between Huron’s Diploma Program and Advanced Placement, the high-achieving pathway that most people are far more familiar with.
A Huron DP student described her previous AP experience in a way that will sound familiar to many high-achievers: It was “really fast memorization in a short period of time,” followed by the realization that, “a year later, I forgot everything.” She was describing a particular approach to learning—sprint, test, move on—that is the norm in American education. The point wasn’t that this, or AP, was bad or worse than the IB, just different. And her impression helps explain why DP matters not just as another “advanced option,” but as a different way of organizing curriculum and instruction.
Other students kept returning to this depth-versus-velocity contrast between AP and DP. Many DP courses run over two years—but not just to cover more. Instead, one student explained to me that, in his higher-level IB classes, “you’re actively building on the knowledge you gained last year.” Another emphasized that it felt less like accumulating credentials and more like learning “for a purpose” because you “get a deeper understanding of the subjects” and have time to synthesize rather than cram.
That theme of synthesis matters because it’s where IB’s curriculum design differs most sharply from how AP is often experienced. Most Advanced Placement classes resemble a comparable introductory college course in that subject and culminate in a single, high-stakes exam at the end of one year (and, if a high enough score is earned, the possibility of college credit or at least entry into higher-level courses).[2] The Diploma Program is designed to make students do sustained work across time and across domains. Students are awarded the diploma only by meeting a demanding set of requirements—including externally assessed examinations and a range of internally assessed coursework that teachers mark but the IB externally moderates. This sometimes leads to college credit, too, but not as often as AP. The DP work requires that students carry concepts from one course into another, write in multiple modes, make connections between texts, data, and ideas, and revisit assignments after receiving feedback rather than treating each unit as a closed loop. Even within individual subjects, DP courses lean harder into writing, revision, and explanation—showing your reasoning, not just arriving at an answer—because so much of the assessment is designed to capture process.
The result is that the full Diploma Program can feel less like a collection of credentials and more like an integrated academic experience. For students who aren’t sure what they want to do after graduation, that breadth can be liberating. One student said she had “no idea what I want to do after high school,” and that the IB helped because it lets you “explore more options” and is “very…interdisciplinary.”
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Another notable aspect of Huron’s Diploma Program is the flexibility built into its design. DP schools must follow standardized subject guides and the aforementioned assessment process, yet they retain substantial discretion. They can choose which courses to offer (even within the full program), set entry requirements, decide how much extra support to offer enrolled students, and pick whether the DP is run as a coherent cohort experience or more as a set of à la carte courses.
Each of these decisions has trade-offs. At Huron, they do everything they can to ensure that any student interested in individual courses or the full DP program enrolls and is ultimately successful. Administrators described building IB elements into the regular day to reduce barriers for students with jobs, family responsibilities, or transportation constraints, as well efforts to reduce the financial burden of IB exam fees so cost doesn’t become a quiet gatekeeper.
This inclusiveness is a feature, not a flaw, but it also creates classrooms with a wider spectrum of achievement levels (a problem not unique to open-access DP course). This can be a challenge for teachers, who have to support students entering at different levels while still aiming at a common, externally assessed standard—and who have to grade work in a way that’s both fair to high-flyers and constructive for students still building foundational skills. Huron’s leaders acknowledged the challenge directly, but also described it as part of the point. “At the heart of it, yes, it’s a challenge,” said one administrator. “But that’s the work.” Their goal is to build on-ramps—academic and logistical—so that rigorous learning isn’t synonymous with exclusivity.
During my visit, students described how teachers try to accommodate that achievement spread: explaining concepts in different ways, assigning additional practice, and when a whole class is struggling, offering more reps of content. One student said that when her math class is struggling, the teacher goes home and finds more practice problems. Another noted that some teachers offer extra-credit opportunities when they know a course is demanding. Students also emphasized that, because the Diploma Program culminates in exams, teachers stress repetition and provide additional problems to build fluency over time.
This also affects and informs grading. Teachers described many grades as effectively formative until they become summative, with an underlying two-year aim; kids don’t have to “know everything on the first time.” And in subjects like language and literature, teachers stressed that IB assessment itself is more varied than a single, one-shot exam. Some assessments are timed, but others involve longer preparation windows, feedback and revision, and oral components where students can prepare and then respond to teacher questions—formats that can make it easier to grade across a wider spectrum of strengths.
My conversations with so many enthusiastic administrators, teachers, and students made me a believer in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. Yes, it can offer the sorts of benefits that high achievers routinely seek: a prestigious, internationally-recognized diploma to go along with the one assigned by your high school, and plenty of college credits for higher-level coursework. But to me, with aging degrees collecting dust on my wall, the best argument for the DP was something more enduring: the quality of the education it provides. Revisiting ideas over time, making connections across domains, serious writing done under guidance—the type of stuff that sticks.
Huron shows what it looks like when a public high school tries to make that experience broadly available and what it requires to do it well. In an education system that often rewards quick performance and easy signaling, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program’s complexity, flexibility, and slow-burn rigor is an outlier. But it may be closer to how more students ought to learn.
[1] The International Baccalaureate’s four programs comprise an extensive menu of offerings from pre-K through grade 12. It’s far too complex to explain here, but the organization offers a good primer on everything here. In this article, I focus on the Diploma Program, including when talking about Ann Arbor Huron High School. But the school also offers a vocational IB program called the Career-related Program (CP), which prepares students for fields like construction, culinary arts, music, marketing, and automotive repair. Approximately 50 juniors and seniors are pursuing the full CP certificate.
[2] Advanced Placement’s new “Capstone” courses—AP Research and AP Seminar—attempt to accomplish much of what IB’s high-level courses do, but they account a small share of courses and exams taken.
