IB Scores Are Out Today. Now What?

It's results day. By now you've seen the number, or your kid has. Some of you are relieved. Others are quietly devastated. A lot of you are doing math right now — one mark shy, points and universities and what happens next.

Here's what I've learned in 24 years of teaching IB, and from time on the examining side, about what actually matters in the next 48 hours.

For students

**First: breathe.**

The score you got today isn't a verdict on you. It's a snapshot of how one exam session went, on one set of questions, with whatever brain you brought into the room that day.

I had a student a few years back who worried me. She'd skipped a year of language somewhere in the sequence and wasn't a natural linguist to start with. I remember thinking early on that a passing score was going to be a real fight. It wasn't. She prepared the way we prepare, and she got the number she needed.

None of that changes who you are or what you're capable of. It really doesn't.

Now the tactical part.

**Look at each subject individually.** Don't just stare at the /45. Which scores match your predicted grades? Which are one point off? Which are two or more off?

**If a score is one point below what a university conditional offer required, call the university this week.** Not next week. This week. Many will still honor the offer, especially if you're one mark shy or the subject wasn't a hard requirement.

**If you think a paper was misgraded, you can request an EUR** — an Enquiry Upon Results. Your school's coordinator submits it, and the deadline is usually mid-September. This isn't a magic wand. Marks can go up, stay the same, or go down. Talk to your coordinator about which subjects are worth challenging. Papers with clearer rubrics tend to shift more than the heavily quantitative ones.

**If you're thinking about a retake**, the November session is an option for one or two subjects. Not the whole diploma. Just what you want to improve. It's a bigger decision than it sounds. Another season of study while your friends move on. Don't decide this weekend.

**And if you got the diploma?** Give yourself the credit. This is a hard program. You earned it.

For parents

If your child just got their scores, the most important thing you can do in the next hour is not lead with the number.

Ask how they're feeling. Not what they got. How they *feel*. Then wait.

Kids tie their sense of self to this score in a way that's hard to fully see from the outside. When it comes in higher than they expected, they float for weeks. When it comes in lower, they crash, and how you respond in the first day matters more than almost anything else you'll do this month.

A few practical things.

**Don't compare to their friends' results.** You're going to hear numbers this weekend. Neighbors, cousins, the parent group chat. Don't bring any of it into your kitchen.

**Don't rush to fix it.** If they're disappointed, sit in it with them first. The instinct to jump into "well, we can appeal, we can retake, we can call admissions" is a loving instinct. But an eighteen-year-old who just got bad news usually doesn't want a project plan. They want to be heard.

Solutions can come tomorrow.

**Do help them make a list, once the initial wave passes.** Sit down together and write out: which universities need to hear from us, which conditional offers are affected, what our questions are for the IB coordinator, what the EUR deadline is. Writing it down helps.

**Do reach out to their subject teachers if you have a relationship there.** A quick "any advice on next steps?" email is fair game. We usually see things you don't.

The longer view

IB scores matter for university admissions in the short term. They stop mattering shortly after.

I don't say that to minimize what happened today. The stakes feel enormous because they *are*, for the next few months. But I've been doing this long enough to have watched a lot of students walk through this door and out the other side.

There's a student I think about now and then. He got a score on results day that was lower than he'd been hoping for, and he took it hard. In the end it didn't matter. He's in college now, minoring in Spanish — still choosing the language, on his own, with no exam attached. That's the part I always hoped would land.

Nobody has asked them their IB score in the last decade. The skills they built during this program are what stayed. Writing under pressure. Defending an argument in a language that isn't your first. Managing eight things at once when they're all due Friday.

That's the part that lasts. Today's number doesn't.

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