News | 05 November 2021
International Baccalaureate Success Opens Doors For Gymnasiet Students
Egor Hagberg could choose where to study thanks to his grades. Year on year more Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet Students achieve top grades in both the IB and national programmes.
Egor Hagberg
When Egor Hagberg ran out of his gymnasiet with his classmates, all celebrating the end of their studies, he didn’t yet know that the grades he had achieved were good enough to open the doors of any university.
Egor had studied the International Baccalaureate, a programme which has been offered at Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet Södermalm (IEGS) for eight years. The International Baccalaureate is an internationally-recognised programme, respected by leading universities, designed to help students develop excellent breadth and depth of knowledge.
Egor said: “On the day of ‘studenten’, I was very happy. I wasn't really too worried because there was nothing to worry about, I felt good after the exams.”
It was about another month before he received his results and discovered that he had received 43 out of 45 points, which put him in the top 6.7 per cent of IB students around the world. This year a score above 40 this year was only achieved by 18 per cent of students globally, compared to 21 per cent of IB students at IEGS.
Year after year students at IEGS manage to achieve above average results in both the national programmes, and the IB, meaning they are in a strong position when it comes to choosing a university programme.
Egor said: “The possibility was there for me to apply for Ivy league universities and get accepted, or to top universities in the UK. The grades were good enough to get into very good universities, and it guaranteed entrance to Handelshögskolan. For me though, it is less about the grades and more about what I managed to learn. I feel I have already covered a lot of the material we are covering at university, while some other students struggle.”
Joseph Hemingway, academic manager at IEGS said: “The IB is a serious and academically demanding programme. I think the students that choose the IB do so because they want to be challenged. When students choose the IB they can also specialise more early on. They choose six subjects as opposed to more than 20 courses that they would take on in the national programmes.
“For the 10 IEGS students achieving 40 plus points, it opens up incredible opportunities for them. These impressive results will give them access to the top universities around the world. They've worked hard for the grades, and they can be secure in the knowledge that their grade is worth the same as any other student from previous years.”
Egor would definitely recommend the International Baccalaureate at IEGS to anyone who is willing to work hard. He said: “You have to be ready to study, it is not simple by any means. You have to understand that you will get something out of it. If you want to apply internationally it is quite a bit better, it is also quite convertible to UK and US.”