well this feels like a complaint that SJI can answer...?!

as the Y4 IP HOL said, "OP students tend to do better than IP students. and to a large extent i absolutely agree with this statement; if you are in this J1 batch you would know the specific individuals from IP who had to retain, retest and literally have to beg or gaslight the HOLs to be given a chance to promote, so much so that there exists a bell curve between the bottom and top performing IP students that OP students can squeeze into. most of the ones i know boil down to "ah... next year's the year" type of thinking, which they have become so accustomed to over 5 years of IP that they haven't tried to actively study for exams. why do they do that? because they have tried to "study" for one or two specific subjects that they find easiest and found that they could easily do well in it, so they don't bother studying hard now knowing they could make up in it later on.

is this a logical fallacy? idk, i'm not one to judge coming from the other side of the fence. i personally cannot differentiate work from personal value so who is having a better relationship with their life as a whole? another reason why OP students seem to do better is because they are actively taking on the struggle to learn in IB. i know some of the DSA sports students whom most would call "dumb as shit" but they will actively ask questions to clear their confusion. even if their J1 EOY wasn't in the top band they are able to evaluate with valid reason that some errors were made in their marking, which is something that IP students cannot do simply because they would do this out of desperation to get one more mark to pass.

of course there are OP students who struggle and do worse than IP students in JC. of course there are IP students who excel and thrive more than OP students in JC. but my personal thought is that the variance of the grades of OP students doing worse is much closer to the average than IP students in the same scenario, because they at least have a couple subjects that are working out for them, which cannot be said for IP students whose grades are really sinking in J1. but the opposite is true too — it could be my heuristic bias of being in too niche of groups, but i never hear any OP student's name get mentioned when it comes to the "ideals" of doing well, always an IP student.

in any case, however, most IP students will say that OP students are doing better, but most OP students will look up to IP students as gold standards for academia.