The dreaded national exams

Back in the USA, some of my old students are finishing up senior year, saying good bye to everyone.  Some are headed to Disney World.  Many have known what college they'll attend for quite a while now, and the time has between college acceptance has been an exercise in trying to remain motivated for anything except the AP exams.  Those AP exams wouldn't be the first they'd ever taken, usually, and they wouldn't change their university acceptance at this point.  There are final exams for the school, too, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking the seniors really care that much about those.

Here in the UK, my students are going insane over exams.  And exams really have consequences.  These exams are nationally recognized and required.  They are, essentially, what all this schooling has been leading up to.  They emphasize the main difference between UK and USA schools.

For readers in the USA, here is a crash course what these exams mean for kids here.  For readers in the UK, you can correct me if I am wrong, as I am still learning.  I teach two levels of physics, GCSE and A-level.  Let's start with GCSE.  It covers Years 9 through 11, which corresponds to grades 8-10 in the USA (they call kindergarten "year 1" which is why the numbers are all one higher).  They learn physics over the span of three years, along with all their other subjects.  The school organizes mock exams each year to give them an idea how they are doing and to predict their likely grade when they finally take the exam.  In the month of May of Year 11, they sit down to take 20+ exams over the span of a couple weeks.  They have to review for that many subjects, reaching back over three years of material! Honestly, these kids amaze me.  They are champs, giving up basically every waking moment to reviewing (they say "revising").  They get one shot, so they really hope they don't get sick or something.  I am sure there is some system for dealing with emergencies, but the kids certainly don't plan on having any more than one shot.  The grades they get determine far more than any tests our 15- and 16-year olds take. Job applications ask about your GCSE scores.  In the USA, we say "I graduated with a 3.56 GPA!" or "Hey, I graduated!"  In the UK, they say the number of GCSE's they passed and/or how many A's and A*'s they got.

Then comes decision time.  They can be done with schooling if they like and just get a job (although I think this is changing), or they can apply to colleges to continue studying something.  College, or sixth form, to UK kids means basically junior and senior year of high school back in the USA, Years 12 and 13.  This is where they will be studying something at A-level.  They apply to colleges all around, not necessarily the one connected to the school they've been attending.  GCSE grades determine where they can go and what they can study.  Yes, they have to narrow down their subject choices.  They can study 4 subjects, or sometimes 5 maximum.  The subjects they choose will determine what they can study at the university level, so they must choose wisely.  This is a decision made at 15 or 16, and it determines what they can even hope to study at a university.  I don't know how many of you are doing something now that you thought you might be doing when you were 15, but I have a feeling the percentage is not high.  I met one man that took Maths, Further Maths, Physics, and Chemistry because he liked Mathematics and figured these prepared him well.  When he went into a university physics program, he realized that the mathematics that inspired him more was economics and banking.  In the USA, this would not be a problem.  Just change majors.  In the UK, he had to drop out, go back to sixth form to take new A-levels, and reapply to university programs.  So this is not small thing.

A-levels actually involve exams each year, AS after Year 12 and A2 after year 13.  After getting their AS results in August, they figure out if they have the grades to remain in sixth form.  Even so, they'll generally drop one subject for Year 13.  They start applying to universities at the beginning of Year 13, and they even get conditional acceptance offers, but they don't really know if they're in until they get their scores in August. Yes, August. They don't actually know if they got into the university until a couple weeks before classes begin.  If they didn't end up getting the necessary scores, there's a mad rush to find programs for which they qualify.

So, for good and/or ill, exams really mean something in the UK.  Students are measured by them.  Schools are rated by them.  Right now, everyone is freaking out about them.