Why your IB score is probably not your Spanish university score

A boy from Geneva came to see me in March with a printout.

Léon, IB student, predicted 38 points.

An agency in Zurich had told his parents this was «equivalent to top Spanish grades».

They believed it.

Why wouldn't they.

Thirty-eight out of forty-five sounds excellent, and it is.

But it isn't a Spanish university score.

Here is the thing nobody had told Léon.

The Spanish system does not read your IB total the way Geneva reads it.

It runs your qualification through its own conversion, produces a number on its own scale, and that number — not your 38 — is what decides where you can study.

The Spanish grade runs from 5 to 14.

Not out of 45. Not out of 100.

Out of 14.

The first part, up to 10, comes from converting your academic record. The rest, the points between 10 and 14, comes from extra exams you may or may not sit.

So Léon's 38 became a base grade well under 10.

And a base grade under 10, on its own, does not open the competitive degrees.

Medicine in Madrid.

Some engineering programmes.

The double degrees everyone wants.

Those sit up near 12, 13, sometimes higher.

His agency had compared a British-style top grade to a Spanish one and called them the same thing.

They are not the same thing.

Ole them for trying, but a 38 in Geneva and a Spanish university score live in two different worlds, and only one of those worlds admits you here.

I've seen this misunderstanding cost real degrees.

A student convinced she was safe for her first choice, sitting comfortable through the spring, finding out in July that her converted grade left her a full point short.

By then there is nothing to do.

The conversion is not an opinion.

It is a fixed calculation applied to every foreign qualification, and it treats your IB the way it treats everyone's — coldly, arithmetically, without caring what your school back home considered excellent.

The range of outcomes here is brutal in the true sense.

Two students with the same 38 can end up with different Spanish grades.

How.

Because one understood which extra exams were worth sitting, and the other assumed 38 was already enough.

One of them competes for medicine.

The other does not.

Léon's parents kept saying the same sentence to me.

«But they told us it was equivalent.»

I understand why that word did so much damage.

«Equivalent» makes you stop checking.

It makes you relax in exactly the months you should be working.

And it hides the fact that your real number — the one Spain will actually use — might be lower than anything you were shown.

Most IB students I meet have never seen their Spanish grade.

They've seen their predicted 38, their 40, their 42.

They've never once seen the number out of 14 that the universities here will read.

And they find out what it is at the worst possible moment.

When the offers come out.