Secondary education scoring systems

[Agro]

Recently I was doing my subject selection, and I began to wonder how other countries do their scoring for the final year at school with regards to exams and standard scoring. I suppose I'll start with mine.

Living in the oh-so-wonderful state of Victoria, Australia, we use the VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education) system. I find it generally confusing, but it's a competitive system that gives you an end rank (ENTER) score based on percentage. If I were to receive a 99-percent, it would mean that my score was theoratically within the top 1% of the state. The ranks are based on scores we receive for a given Unit 3/4 subject (eg. 20th Century History 3/4, Biology 3/4) which is out of 50.

This score is again based on a ranking system, and it gets confusing at this point. Depending on the difficulty of the subject and who the people doing that subject are (decided through a compulsory standardised test), your mark (out of 50, known as a "raw score") is scaled up or down, varying between numbers of -10 (eg. Dance) to +13 (LOTE Arabic). For some reason, however, if you score a 50 in a subject, your mark will not be scaled down.

That is, in a very tightly packed nutshell, VCE. Is your country's system any more or less complicated?

[Rehab]

And this is just for the last year of high school? To my knowledge America doesn't have a system like that for any particular year, though the way colleges accept GPA's and standardized testing results is to the best of my limited knowledge subjective to the college we apply to.

[Crystal Shards]

In all the American schools I've been to, everything is based on percentage correct out of 100% and generally in 10% increments. 90%+ is generally an A, though I have seen 85%+ to 92%+. It just depends on the school, and in university, on the professor. 60% is generally a D, and anything 59.9% and below is failing.

GPA is set up from 0-4. An A is a 4, B a 3, C a 2, D a 1, and F a 0. You take the average to get your GPA. In university, classes have certain amount of credits, and your GPA will be like this: (grade x credit hours)+(grade x credit hours of a different class)+(etc)/total number of credits. So if you take a 3-credit class and get an A in it, that's 12 points, and another 3-credit class and get a B, that's 9 points, 9+12=21, 21/6 is 3.5, so your GPA is a 3.5.

There are some standardized tests that vary. The Terra Nova (given to middle schoolers and some high schoolers), for instance, is based on percentiles. These don't affect your GPA or anything though. SAT and ACT are based roughly on percentiles as well.

As for Germany, it's roughly the same thing except kind of in reverse. The grading system is 1 through 5, with 1 being the best and 5 being the worst.

Edited June 26, 2009 by Crystal Shards

[Knife]

Recently I was doing my subject selection, and I began to wonder how other countries do their scoring for the final year at school with regards to exams and standard scoring. I suppose I'll start with mine.

Living in the oh-so-wonderful state of Victoria, Australia, we use the VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education) system. I find it generally confusing, but it's a competitive system that gives you an end rank (ENTER) score based on percentage. If I were to receive a 99-percent, it would mean that my score was theoratically within the top 1% of the state. The ranks are based on scores we receive for a given Unit 3/4 subject (eg. 20th Century History 3/4, Biology 3/4) which is out of 50.

This score is again based on a ranking system, and it gets confusing at this point. Depending on the difficulty of the subject and who the people doing that subject are (decided through a compulsory standardised test), your mark (out of 50, known as a "raw score") is scaled up or down, varying between numbers of -10 (eg. Dance) to +13 (LOTE Arabic). For some reason, however, if you score a 50 in a subject, your mark will not be scaled down.

That is, in a very tightly packed nutshell, VCE. Is your country's system any more or less complicated?

That sounds very competitive.

[California Mountain Snake]

It sounds like Australia is similar to the United States in that testing varies by Provence or State. Unlike most of Europe, the United States has very few national standards (control over education is traditionally interpreted as a power delegated to the states in the Constitution), and the government usually relies one state level testing when determining the amount of federal funding to allocate for each state's education system (this money is separate from a state's own revenue and school budgeting process.)

Although I've graduated from high school already, in Vermont there was a general lack of consensus over the which test to use, so we ended up taking a lot of pilot tests that had no consequence except pissing people off in general. It was fairly retarded. Vermont has no high school exit requirements (for public schools) however, so if didn't really matter anyways.

However, if you live in New York state, you have to take the Regents, a statewide standardized aptitude test in various subjects that you must pass in order to graduate. I'm sure there are other states with exit exams for public schools, I am just unaware of them.

In terms of college entrance the most commonly used tests are the SAT and ACT (usually one or the other, they cover the same material basically, but some people prefer one over the other), and for high level colleges they may look at your SAT IIs (specific subject tests, like US history or chemical biology), or at how many AP tests you have taken. AP classes ("Advanced Placement") are probably the closest thing the United States comes to a nationally standardized curriculum, despite the fact that the curriculum for AP classes is determined by the College Board, which despite their name is a private, for profit company which also designs the SAT. AP classes all have corresponding AP tests, which you can score from a 1 to a 5 on, relative to other people's scores (Top 20% get a 5, next 20% get a 4, etc). Some universities let you skip entry level classes if you score well on an AP in high school, to prevent you from reviewing the same material twice. Often senior year AP test results are not calculated by the time you are admitted to college, so most of the time a college will just ask how many APs you took, and not really care about the score.

Of course how much credence a college gives to standardized testing is entirely in the purview of the institution. I happened to get into Harvard with SATs far below the average for students admitted to that institution, and I credit my admittance on my extracurricular activities and application essay.

[Rehab]

Harvard? Holy shit. Do you have any idea whether Ivy's are really as hard to get into as the legends say?

Edited June 30, 2009 by Mac

[Crystal Shards]

Harvard? Holy shit. Do you have any idea whether Ivy's are really as hard to get into as the legends say?

It's about 7%-10% at Harvard, depending on the year. It's also been shown that--in most cases--the only difference between an Ivy League degree and a normal degree is the name; the quality isn't that much higher than at a normal school (again, depending on the schools being compared). Not ragging on Ivy League or anything; just putting that out there since people sometimes like to act like IL is the Holy Grail of education or something. It depends on what you want to do.

Edited June 30, 2009 by Crystal Shards

[Raven]

Secondary education in the United Kingdom (Wales, England and Northern Ireland. Scotland, despite being a part of the UK, has it's own Secondary education system) starts from age 11 through to 16, those years are named Year 7 through to Year 11, since the first 6 years are spent in a Primary School. Education is compulsory up until the end of year 11 (the last Friday in June in the academic year a person turns 16), with a further non-compulsory, optional two years of education.

Once a person is finished with Year 11, they can choose to do the extra two years in a Secondary school (Year 12 and 13), leave Secondary school for a College, get an apprenticeship, or find a job, or be a lazy, jobless bum living off tax payer's money, and maybe have a kid while they're at it. Years 12 and 13 are known as "Sixth Form". Here, students need to choose and specialise between three to five subjects for their A Levels.

A Levels (Year 13, where people are usually aged 18) work on a grading system of A to E. Anything above 80% of a subject is an A, 70% to 79% for a B, 60% to 69% for a C, 50% to 59% for a D, and 40% to 49% for an E. Anything below 40% is given an U, which basically means "Fail".

Once a person has obtained their A Levels (or College qualification), they can enter University, assuming they have the qualifications needed for the University course they have chosen to do.

I think I have heard that they are changing the compulsory age to stay in school from age 16 to age 18. I don't know if this is true or not, or when they may be implementing it if true.