h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Here's some info about Western Australia's education system. (The other states have similar, but not quite the same systems). You used to start off with Pre-primary in the year you turn 4 or 5 (depending on the school) and start Primary school in the year you turn 6. This has been changed recently to have people born later in the year held back. (Being a November baby and always being ahead of my peers, I'm glad this didn't change earlier.)

Years 1-7 are at Primary school and 8-12 are at High school (usually 13-17 years old). Primary schools almost (if not) always have a uniform and there is no choice of subjects. Public High schools usually have dress codes, private ones have uniforms. You get some choice of subjects in lower school (reference to the first three years of High school), but Maths, Science, English and Social Studies are required. After turning 15 years old, usually partway through year 10, school is non-compulsary. In upper school you get complete choice of subjects from TEE subjects and non-TEE (or vocational) subjects.

TEE is the Tertiary Entrance Examinations and is required to get into University (unless you get a Diploma from TAFE, but I won't go into that). To actually get a TES or TER (Tertiary Entrance Score and Tertiary Entrance Rank respectively, I'll explain later) you have to complete at least four TEE subjects, although you can study up to 6 subjects per year. Of these four subjects, at least one must be from List 1 and at least one from List 2. List 1 is humanity subjects and List 2 is science/math subjects. TEE English is unlisted. You must also pass either English or English Literature.

The TES is worked out by taking the average of your highest four or five scores satisfying the above conditions and multiplying by 5.1; and TER is a percentile ranking from your TES. TERs were only introduced three years ago, so most people still talk about TESs.

Hope I haven't bored you with the intimate details of this.

Small point about English boarding schools - not all of them are public (ie private) schools. My sons went to one run by the local education authority(most state schools in England are still funded through such bodies). This meant that the education was free, but that I had to pay for the board and lodging. There are still a few(very few) such schools around

I actually went to a state-funded boarding school myself, here in the States.

Mikey

So how was it? I absolutely loathed and detested my 7 years incarceration, only the lessons were good (very small classes). The rest: yuk. Food was abominable, and because it was (still is) the oldest girls' school in UK (it knows who it is!) we had to wear the most ridiculous uniforms (which included, on occasion: poke bonnets and capes)

Mine wasn't so bad (hey, but maybe I am repressing ) However it has put me off boiled potatoes for life (every night for five years) *shudder* Once I got out and into a comprehensive everything was a lot easier - Animal Farm we did at 11 in the boarding school (along with all the Ruskie revolution references), had to do it again at 16 in the comprehensive, and the Latin and French really helped with my grammar (as you can, no doubt, tell )....
BCNU - Crescent

My experience was actually pretty good -- definitely better than the alternatives, anyway. We didn't have uniforms, and the food (while seeming awful then) was actually pretty good in comparison to what I got later in the university cafeterias. Plus it was co-ed.

Mikey

Oh I'm even sadder now. Mine was single sex, which wouldn't have been so bad but they were all the same sex as me! The food was horrible. OK breakfast wasn't bad, but even now come tuesday I expect bacon & tinned tomatoes, wednesday is scrambled egg etc.

The teaching, however, was pretty good. Classes no bigger than 20 up to O-levels, and I was "lucky" enough that for my A-levels my biggest class was 5! Boy oh boy did we have to do our prep, no hiding behind anyone then! Sport was pretty well emphasised, plus all the traditionally male subjects - the headmistress had been in the Navy and knew that women could do just as well as men.... pretty forward thinking. But we had all the horrible public/boarding school traditions, including bullying and scaring the pants off the juniors. And dormitories with 20 beds!

One of the things that interests me about the difference between Am and Br educations is the qualifications you get out of them (not saying one is better befopre we start!). Am I right that basically your goal in Am education is to get a High School Diploma, which basically says you achieved a certain standard of achievement overall in all subjects? What I'd like to know is, is this certificate based on exam results at the end of your final year, or by racking up grades over the years (is that why being a straight A student is such a big deal? What if you are really good at Maths but useless at French? Does this affect the notation on the certificate? What is the notation (do you get like a grade A Certificate, grade B etc etc or do you get a rundown of your grades in each subject?).

Is this Diploma what is used to get you into higher ed or are their other exams you have to take? Individual exams for each uni?

Oh, and although in Britain you study for the last 2 years of compulsiary ed for GCSE's, it is possible to fail all of them (or some of them) and leave w/out terribly impressive qualifications. Ditto A levels. What happens in Am? When _do_ you get the Diploma? after 16 or 18? What happens if you don't get it?

Sorry, that's abit jumbled. Feel free to ignore it!

OK, so here's some answers to Solnushka's questions about American high school diplomas and college/university entrance.

You get a high school diploma after passing the minimum number of classes required by your state and local school district. Normally, this is 4 years of English, 3 years of math, 2 years of science, 3 years of history/government, 1-2 years of foreign language, 1 year of arts, physical education, health, plus a certain number of electives. Grades are done per semester or quarter (3-4 months), so if you fail a semester you can retake it and pass. Most students take more than the bare minimum, and you have to if you want to get into college/university (note: college and university mean virtually the same thing here in the US, so I will just say college from here on out, as that is the prevailing term). All this takes 4 years (although some students finish in 3 and others take 5 or 6), so most students graduate around age 18.

Whether or not you pass a class is virtually never dependent on a single exam -- it's generally a weighted average of homework, papers, tests, and a final exam. Your grades across all classes are averaged into a GPA, which can be an important factor in college admissions. However, colleges also look at your transcript, which shows all your classes and grades, so you're not automatically screwed if you just really sucked at French. if you took an advanced/honors class, that's usually adjusted for in your GPA, so a "B" in honors french is like getting an "A" in regular french.

In most areas, you get the same high school diploma regardless of your grades (as long as you passed), although some places have special "honors diplomas" (which no one pays any attention to in real life).

Some states (like Texas) do have a big exam you have to pass in order to graduate, but it actually only covers the stuff they would expect a 14 year old to know.

If, for some reason or another, you don't graduate from high school, you take the GED. It's a big test that covers the bare minimum that a high school graduate should theoretically know. In practice, a GED counts for a lot less than a high school diploma -- colleges may be reluctant to accept it, as are many employers (including the Army).

To get into college, you need a high school diploma and you have to take the SAT (or the ACT, which is almost the same thing). The SAT is a standardized verbal and math test, and doing well on this supposedly predicts who will make good college students. Some students take it over and over again until they get a good score. There are also SAT II exams (which used to be called Achievement Tests), which measure your knowledge in one subject area (i.e., French) -- not all colleges require the SAT II's. Additionally, honors students can take AP exams, which test a single subject area, but in considerably greater depth than the SAT IIs. A student who does well on an AP exams generally gets a years worth of college credit for the class. To get into a really competitive university, you have to have taken good classes in high school, have a good GPA, high SAT score, have done extracurricular activities (i.e., sports), and write a good essay. To get into a lower level state school, you just need to have a decent GPA and have taken the SAT at all.

Community colleges (sometimes called junior colleges or vocational colleges) are generally 2 year schools and will take anyone with a high school diploma or a GED.

hope this explains things -- if not, let me know and I will re-splain.

mikey

Arcane note: in this country, SAT means the tests you take in the years before secondary school and before GCSE, ie. years 6 and 9. They seem totally pointless to me, especially the ones in year 6. They don't give you any qualifications, and they don't go on your CV.

Do you have registration in US schools? That is, are there places you have to go in the morning and afternoon so that your teachers can tell when you're skiving?

That was fantastic, thanks Mikey. I've picked up bits and pieces here and there, but for the same reasons that you want to know about our education system, I want to know about yours.

On to round two. The schools you see in Am movies seem huge to me. There were only about 750 at my (completely bottom of the league tables. probably) comprehensive/state school at its peak. You tend to know everyone in your year at least very well. In Am schools (at least fictional ones) it seems possible to go your whole school carreer and still not have met everyone in your year. I think that is what we mean by cliquey. I guess you have to form little bands otherwise you get overwhelmed. I was sick to death of the people I was at school at by the time I was 12, so I always liked the air of mistique.

You asked about forms. This is an attempt to foster a bit of team spirit. My school had four 'houses', which happened to be named after famous british women. Each year therefore was split up into four forms, or four groups of students who did all the non streamed (mixed ability) subjects together. And registration and what have you. Some schools take it further by having the houses compete against each other in sports comps and the like, but by the time I got there my school had rather given up on the whole idea. They later scrapped the whole houses idea too and just assigned letters to the forms, thus finally laying to rest the whole community within a community thing, thank god. The Harry Potter books seem to have the concept mapped out rather well as it goes. I got stuck in the equivalent of Hufflepuff. How humiliating.

Oh yeah. Sorry. Exactly how stuffed are you if you don't get your original high school dip. then? And what arew the (rough) percentages of people who don't?

I'll hop in with a bit of New York-centric info:

We have delightful exams in New York called Regents Exams. IIRC, only Texas has them as well. Back in the olden days you were required to take the English, Math, and one other Regents to graduate from High School with a Regents Diploma. This meant nothing (I mean, I took a typing Regents, for heaven's sake!), nobody ever asked if you had a Regents Diploma when they hired you. I suppose it means something for College entrance, but I think they go more on SAT scores. I went to a State University however, and the curriculum I entered didn't need SAT scores - thank God! Being an artist, my mind isn't exactly math-centric, and I scored poorly on the SATs because of it.

The mandatory testing in New York is getting more and more stringent, they've just added them to the youngsters' curriculum in middle school (I can't remember what grades have to take them, offhand), and the teachers are in an uproar because basically they're now just teaching these kids for testing purposes, and not able to expand on knowledge because there's just so much information to cover for these tests. If you don't pass the tests, you don't get promoted. This is to ensure that children are learning enough - for an affluent country our kids do very poorly in education!

And if you don't get a high school diploma, it's nearly impossible to find a decent job outside of flipping burgers. But even if you drop out of school, it relatively easy to earn the GED in night school. They really do bend over backwards to help you get it.

Class sizes? Depends entirely on your school district. I went to high school in a fairly large town (60,000+ pop.), and we only had one public high school. There were approx. 3000 kids in our school for 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. I remember getting my yearbook, and the vast majority of the faces were of people I'd never even seen before (in fact, my best friend married a fellow that she graduated with in high school - never even met him until 10 years later!).

Weird. My primary school was 450 people, although I didn't know everyone in my year as I was always part of a very close group of about 5 of us. My secondary school had about 1000 students, plus another 200 in the sixth form. Most of the people in my year there seemed to hate me, so I never got to know them either. Thankfully. Everyone knew who I was though, for all the wrong reasons.

In the first five years of secondary school the smallest classes were about 23, while the largest was 29 or so for top set GCSE German! This was because there were certain people in my year who the teachers would not have together in the same classroom, so top set was boosted with people who should never have been there in order to prevent riots. I got the impression that my year was worse than any other with regard to that kind of thing.

At sixth form though everything was different - although it's part of the same school, almost nobody who did their GCSEs there went on to that sixth form, so most of the students were from elsewhere - including all over the world, as it's an International Sixth Form, which is why I was lucky enough to do the International Baccalaureate rather than A Levels. My IB diploma got me into Uni, so fingers crossed for a good degree in summer 2003!

Other points of note:
My primary school introduced a non-compulsory uniform which was actually just a polo shirt and sweatshirt with the school logo on - the polo shirts could be got in house colours, although you were allowed to wear whatever colour you liked, as houses only mattered on sports day. Houses (there were four) were named after trees - Cedar (Red), Maple (Green), Willow (Blue) and Beech (Yellow). Strangely enough, while I was in Maple, my three best friends were in Cedar, Willow and Beech, so sports dayw as always fairly miserable as the houses weren't allowed to intermingle, and we were all really, really useless at sports. The school now has a compulsory uniform (and a new headteacher, who was my teacher in my last year there).

My secondary school had a compulsory uniform consisting of (after my first year there, when they changed it) a light blue polo shirt or shirt, a school pullover (navy blue for years 7-9, with 10 and 11 being able to choose from navy, green or a hideous maroon colour that later mutated into a very strange shade of red), charcoal grey trousers (for the boys - although most had black or nearly black), navy trousers or skirt (for the girls - guess what! most wore trousers), black shoes (no trainers, but did that stop anyone? Oh no...) plus of course the hated PE kit.

Sixth form was, as most sixth forms I know of, uniformless.

Pete asked:

---Do you have registration in US schools? That is, are there places you have to go in the morning and afternoon so that your teachers can tell when you're skiving?---

I'm not entirely sure what "skiving" means, but -- Many schools have a "homeroom" period each morning -- about 15 minutes where they take attendance, make announcements, and whatnot. However, this is much more common in junior high schools than in high schools. High schools usually just take attendance at each class.


Mikey

Solnushka asked about the size of US schools:

This drastically depends on where you live and whether you go to a public (state) or private school. Private schools tend to be smaller (i.e., less than 100 students per grade). Public schools are bigger in the cities and smaller in the rural areas, but it's not uncommon for a public high school to have 2000 students across 4 grades.

At the junior high level, schools seem to have about 500-1000 students across 3 grades. Many junior high schools have "teams", which seem a little similar to the forms you described. In my junior high we were all in one of three teams (green, white, or blue I think), and each had about 75-100 students. You obviously didn't have everyone in all of your classes, but a team shared all the same teachers, etc. Supposedly this makes it easier to make friends, etc., but its actually done to make things easier for the teachers.


Mikey

Solnushka asked:
----Oh yeah. Sorry. Exactly how stuffed are you if you don't get your original high school dip. then? And what arew the (rough) percentages of people who don't?-----

It depends on the area, but generally ranges from 10-30%. However, almost ALL kids who don't get their diplomas are kids who dropped out of school. It's exceedingly difficult to actually try and get a diploma and fail to do so. My little sister's school bent over backwards to make sure she got hers. She had to do summer school every year, take several math classes a second time, they "waived" her PE requirement, etc. It's not like they kick you out at 18 if you haven't earned it yet -- you can stay until age 21 if you need to, although this usually just happens with mentally retarded kids.

For example, while the state may say that you need 2 or 3 years of math to graduate, they don't usually specify what kind of math. So while students who want to go on to college take algebra, geometry, etc., schools also offer basic arithmetic, "consumer math" (balancing a checkbook, making a budget, paying taxes, etc.), "business math", etc. So, requirements for a university generally specify what kind of math you need to have had as a prerequisite for applying (usually at least 2 years algebra and 1 year geometry).


Mikey

We always had "homeroom" where you went for about 15 minutes in the morning to say the "Pledge of Allegiance", have a "Moment of silent meditation", and have attendance taken. Every teacher in subsequent classes would also take attendance. The "Vice Principal" was in charge of looking at all these attendance sheets to see if you were cutting class or not, then s/he'd hunt you down.

Micky

Whats the earliest age at which you can legally leave school and get a job.

I ask because over here (UK) compulsory schooling finishes at 16 at which point you take your GCSE exams (in my day O levels but I'm showing my age there).

After that it's optional although to get into university you have to either do A levels (at a local college or in a school sixth form)or a vocational qualification (OND etc) in a relevent subject.

Well I get caught up in research for my year 11 students(15-16)who are taking their GCSE art exam and have asked me to find certain images if I can which takes all evening.I come back some 36 hours later and everyone seems to have filled you in as to the education system in England/Scootland.Good job they have done too.
Now as to ages in schools.
There are 3 terms,Winter,Spring and Summer.
Children start school the term they are 5.This means that children born after(our school year begins in September through to July)August start in September(winter term).Those born after January start after New Year(spring term).Those born after Easter(remember Easter is a moveable festival)up to August start after Easter(summer term).There is a Summer holiday lasting about six weeks by the way.
Children are in the Reception class when 5 and because of the crazy term thing some only get 1 term in reception while some get a whole school year.
So it goes as this
Year R(for Reception)4/5
Year 1 5/6
year 2 6/7
The above is Infants
Year 3 7/8
Year 4 8/9
Year 5 9/10
Year 6 10/11
The above is Middle school or Juniors
Year 7 11/12
Year 8 12/13
Year 9 13/14
Year 10 14/15
Year 11 15/16(16 is the age at which a child may leave school and seek employment but the Government seems very keen for 16 year olds to go on to further education and gives them every encouragement.
The above is Secondary school and the last two
years are Students who are involved in GCSE's(external exams).
Sixth form college(originally secondary schools called their students years 1,2,3,4,5 and 16/18 were called the 6th form.These were and are the ones who seek to obtain A-levels(advanced level)external exams.
When Goverment decided to allow sixth form colleges to separate from schools and become institutions on their own the name stuck.However the old technical colleges also became sixth form colleges although still called Technical colleges.
So Sixth form college 16/18.There are a variety of qualifications many of which confuse me but the main two are A-levels(needed for university)and NVQ's which are a form of A-level where a student gets on the job training.
University 18-?The final age for finishing depends on what degree,what future occupation and the ability of individual students to pay for their education.Most now have to obtain a student loan repayable when they get a future job with sufficient funds to repay the loan.Some part time degree students can take some time to get a degree(single parents).It also depends at what age some people want to be educated.There are access courses for mature students who have decided to go back and continue their education but of course they will have to support themselves and any family they may have.
More another time.