CDNIS vs HKIS

Shootastar

If your kid loves the school and the teachers and community are wonderful, there is no obvious reason for you to make a change, whether HKIS is a "better" school or not. A change of school may necessitate adjustment on your kid. If the adjustment is not good, then it may have negative impact on your kid.

Shootastar

回覆 shabushabu 的帖子

CDNIS adopted the IB and Canadian curriculum while HKIS adopts the US AP (liberal art) system. You should consider which education is good to your kid. You should thoroughly understand the two systems apart from the personal factors mentioned by you before you make a decision.

Shootastar

回覆 nintendo 的帖子

I can't agree with you more.

The American education system adopts the liberal art style education. The beauty of a liberal art style education is that you will have a wide choice of subjects for you to explore before you make a decision on what you really love.

IB also allows students to choose subjects but it is rather "rigid" in the sense that you have to choose subjects from different areas. As far as I know, you cannot take 3 science subjects at the same time even if you are strong on science. Again, you cannot drop science subjects even if you are weak.

It is not a right or wrong question for AP or IB education system. It is a matter for you to know which education system will suit your kid more so as to pust his limit of study to the far end of his potential.

Shootastar

回覆 shabushabu 的帖子

When our kids were young (around 2000), the IB system was not very popular in Hong Kong. At that time, only CIS and LPC adopted the IB system (correct me if I am wrong) and the number of IB graduates in the whole world was around 50,000 (also correct me if I am wrong). We then spent a lot of time to do research on the AP, AL and the local AL system. After comparing the pros and cons of the three education systems, we decided to take the AP system. At that time only 3 schools adopted the AP systems (HKIS, AIS and ICS).

Of course, if IB was as popular as it is today, we will explore thoroughly IB before we made the decision. As I said, the beauty of a liberal art style education (AP system) is to allow you flexibility to explore different subjects so as to find your true love. You will see that the range of subjects offered by HKIS is wider than other schools.

Although college placement results reflect something about the schools, the results may not give you a complete picture of the performance of the students because there are a number of factors, which are unrelated to the school performance, as far as college placement is concerned.  If you want to compare different specific schools such as CDNIS and HKIS, apart from the education system they adopted, you have to compare the public examination results among their education systems.

If the students of a particular school perform well above or well below the peers in the same education system (academic results, music performance, sport performance etc), you should think the reasons why it is so. If they consistently perform well, there must be some reasons in terms of quality of teachers, supports from the schools, community relationship, opportunities offered to students, hard wares of the schools.

To be honest, there should not be many parents whose kids had or have studied in both CDNIS and HKIS. I think you should do researches into the above factors. You will have an idea about the two schools after your researches. Having said that I think the most important factor is what kind of education system you think will best fit your kid. No doubt both CDNIS and HKIS are very popular and top IS among international schools in Hong Kong.