What actually counts

Almost every gap this site can show you is a subject level, not a grade. Mathematics A is the most common one: it is HL in IB terms, and the difference between HL and SL closes or opens entire fields. Physics B, Chemistry B and Social Studies B do the same in narrower ways.

If you already know roughly what you want to study, check the requirements now rather than in your final year. If you do not, Mathematics HL keeps the most doors open of any single choice.

Denmark lets you top up a missing level through gymnasial supplering, taken at a VUC or GSK centre. Two things to know before you plan around it: the courses are taught in Danish, and GSK can only meet a specific subject requirement — it cannot raise your overall qualification level.

If you hold a full IB Diploma your qualification level is already fine, so GSK is exactly the right tool for a missing Mathematics A. If you hold DP Course Results rather than a Diploma, GSK is the wrong tool entirely. Your qualification level is not yet university-bachelor standard, and the Agency says plainly that GSK cannot raise it — that takes hf-enkeltfag, or sitting the subjects as a self-study candidate. Taking a GSK course in that situation costs you a term and changes nothing. GSK is still the right tool for a specific subject requirement at an erhvervsakademi or professionsbachelor programme, and a subject taken for that stays valid if you later switch to a university bachelor.

Most Danish bachelor's degrees are taught in Danish and require Danish at A level. If you took Danish A1 or Danish A Literature at either level you already have it. If you did not, and you want a Danish-taught programme, you will need Studieprøven i dansk or an equivalent.

This is the single biggest constraint on studying in Denmark with an IB, and it is rarely stated as a headline. The University of Copenhagen teaches every one of its bachelor's degrees in Danish.

Danish applications close on 15 March and IB results are not released until 6 July. The mechanism that resolves this is the IB's own results service: your coordinator registers you and your results travel directly to up to six institutions.

Get a receipt. This is administrative rather than academic, and it is the single most common way an otherwise complete application fails.

Tests are required rather than optional wherever they appear, and their registration deadlines sit well before the application deadlines — UAT-UK for Oxford and Cambridge closes in late September, two and a half weeks before the UCAS deadline in mid-October. Austria's MedAT registration closes in March for a July test, about three months before IB results.

SDU in Denmark uses the uniTEST for quota 2. Italy uses TOLC and IMAT. Central European medical schools run their own entrance exams, several of which can be sat online from Denmark.

For art, design, architecture and most music programmes the portfolio or audition is the admission decision, and grades are close to irrelevant beside it. This is the one area where the usual logic of this site inverts.

Read the specific brief: schools ask for very different things, and a general portfolio satisfies none of them well.

Copenhagen Business School requires one on all six of its English-taught programmes. The Dutch numerus fixus selection procedures usually include something similar. US applications are built around it.

One sharp caveat for a May 2027 IB candidate applying to CBS: its essay only counts in the Danish quota 2 round if at least three months have passed since you finished school. If you apply straight from the IB, your essay does not count. That is the kind of rule that makes the difference between a considered application and a wasted one.

Many Danish institutions count documented relevant work or education in quota 2 — Aalborg, for example, counts up to twelve months. The documentation has to be specific: an employer's statement giving your responsibilities, the period of employment, weekly hours and a signature.

Aalborg is refreshingly blunt that motivational letters and recommendations are not considered relevant in its quota 2 and are not required. Other institutions differ. Check the one you want rather than assuming.

In systems with holistic admissions — the US most of all, and UK personal statements to a lesser degree — sustained depth in one or two things reads far better than a long list. Admissions officers read thousands of these and can tell the difference between a commitment and a collection.

In most of Europe this has no effect whatsoever. Danish quota 1 is grades alone, and quota 2 counts documented work rather than interests. Do not build an activity portfolio for a European application; it will not be read.

CAS is required by the IB and by essentially no university. No admissions office in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands will read it. Treating it as an admissions instrument is a misunderstanding that costs students a lot of stress for nothing.

What it is genuinely good for: finding out whether you like something before you commit three years to it. A student who volunteers in a hospital and discovers they cannot stand it has learned something far more valuable than a line on a form. That is worth doing deliberately.

The Extended Essay is four thousand words of independent research — the closest thing in the Diploma to what a university degree actually feels like. Choosing it in a subject you are considering is the cheapest test available of whether you want to spend three years on it.

It will not get you in. Oxford and Cambridge interviewers may discuss it if it is relevant, and that is the strongest claim anyone can honestly make. No university awards points for an EE topic, and no topic is strategically better than another.

The real benefit is different: students who write an EE in their intended field arrive at university already knowing how to structure an argument and chase a source, which is most of the first year.

Most of continental Europe teaches its bachelor's degrees in its own language. The English-taught set is real but narrow, and it is narrowing in the Netherlands.

German at B2 opens the whole German, Austrian and Swiss systems, all of which are close to free. That is a much larger prize than an extra English-taught option, and it is reachable from a good IB German B.

Free tuition and an expensive city can easily cost more than modest tuition somewhere cheap. Norway charges no tuition and budgets NOK 15,488 a month to live (about €1,435 at the ECB rate of 24 September 2026). Copenhagen is the most expensive place to be a student in Denmark by a distance, and several strong English-taught programmes are in cities that cost half as much.

If you can claim Danish SU — Danish citizens, and EU/EEA citizens with equal status, for example through a parent who works in Denmark — work out early whether it follows you. It can, for a full degree abroad, if you also meet the ties-to-Denmark requirement: two years living here in the last ten is one way. In another Nordic country you get SU and loans exactly as if you studied in Denmark — which, for anyone starting from 2025, means the prescribed length of the programme and no more. Elsewhere, at most four years (48 klip). If you cannot claim SU, look first at your own country's student finance: several EU/EEA systems fund a full degree in another country.

Everything on this site is a description. Sønderborg and Copenhagen are both in Denmark and are not remotely the same experience, and no amount of careful prose substitutes for standing in a place for an afternoon.

Open days are the obvious route. Failing that, a train ticket and a wander is cheap compared to three years somewhere you did not want to be.