You forgot the AS Levels.
I didn’t forget them, they didn’t exist in my day! They’re sort of half an A level, is that right?
You sit them one year after the O’Levelsnd one year before the full A Level. The syllabus is now divided inti modules; some are AS modules some are A-Level module. It is typical to do 5 AS Levels and then drop two subject and get a complete A Level in three; the idea being it allows students to explore what they want more and they can always sit for the full A-Level later on if they so feel like it.
It was inytriduced in 2001 and became compulsory for both the home and overseas* students in 2004. I had the option of giving it in 2002 but as I had just finished my O’Levels in 2001 I told them to go bugger off; no way I would be giving another board exam before I absolutly had to.
*meaning places like India, Pakistan, Bangaldesh, Singapore, Brunei and UAE where many schools take the UK exam in preferance to the local one. However the syllabus for overseas students is slightly differente; from what I have been told more challenging.
AS Levels have been around a LOT longer, just they weren’t taken as seriously.
I have a grade N in AS General Studies that I took in 1992. I didn’t know the format of the exam when I went in, I just did it for the sheer hell of it. I think I arsed up the essays rather spectacularly.
I have a grade C in AS Mathematics taken in 1991, which is amusing as I have a 2(i) in Pure Mathematics. I was a very lazy student and only applied myself when it absolutely definitely was required. ASes just weren’t important to me.
The U.S. did get territory in the War of 1812. That’s how Florida was acquired.
Enough with the hijacks. Here are two new threads for you:
On Thanksgiving: Thanksgiving holiday in other countries - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
On the War of 1812: Did the U.S. lose the War of 1812? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
Thanks!
Jennyrosity, substitute GCSE for O levels in my last post and the one by Peter Morris before mine. Yes, we know that it’s called GCSE now. You can see in my earlier posts that I use GCSE instead of O level. Just as you didn’t mention the AS levels because they’re after your time, we used O levels instead of GCSE because that’s the older name.
AK84, it’s not really true that the first two years of college in the U.S. are party time. I know that it’s possible to get that impression from watching American TV and movies. Please memorize that following statement, which will be very useful for many future threads: All American TV shows and movies are utter lies. Yes, a lot of students spend too much time partying when they enter college. They flunk out. For the others, it isn’t like that at all. For the people who didn’t do particularly well in high school, those two years are incredibly difficult. They have to learn all the study skills they never learned before, catch up on the material that they should have learned in high school, and learn the new material that they are being taught. Even for those people who did well in high school, they have to get used to a higher level of difficulty in the material that they are studying and a higher level of concentration in their studying.
That’s what it’s like going from O Levels/GCSEs to A Levels. A Levels were probably the toughest things I ever did, University (the first couple of years at least) seemed a doddle after that.
Thank God. I thought PeterMorris was going to start shelling Ft. McHenry with turkeys soon.
It is, however, true that at most US colleges, you can delay your choice of major by a year or two. Most majors will have a significant number of “general studies” classes required: Everyone, regardless of major, is expected to have at least some background in history, and literature, and the sciences, and so on. So if you haven’t yet chosen a major when you get to college, you’ll spend your first year or two just taking those classes. And if you still haven’t chosen, there’s often some sort of general studies major, whereby you can actually graduate college without ever specializing.
This system does not work particularly well for the sciences. If you transfer into a science major from some other major or undecided (including another science, unless it’s really closely related), you’re almost guaranteed to need at least an extra year to get your degree. Most semesters, I was actually required to take more classes than students in most majors were allowed to take.
Yes. That makes sense. So you would tell someone how many GCSE levels you have rather than stating that you have a high school diploma?
That sounds very specialized at an early age. It also explains a remark I remember someone making about Princess Diana. They said she didn’t have any O levels so she was like an American high school drop out. I didn’t understand it at the time but I do now. Then again I thought she was stupid because she married Charles in the first place. I remember being an eleven year old transfixed by the wedding but repulsed by the groom.
INCOMING! :: Squawk! ::
It is. It was a major fault of the old O level/A level system. It has been partially addressed now by the AS levels - mentioned above - where most bright kids will do five in the lower sixth (aged 17) before dropping two of them and doing three A levels. Also as mentioned above more and more of the high achieving kids are doing four or even five A levels - something that was practically unheard of when I was at school 30 - no, nearly 40 - years ago.
As God is my witness I thought turkeys could fly.
I have since done an LLB, a Post Grad Diploma, the Bar and now doing an LLM; and I can confirm that A-Levels was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do.
I am the last person who can claim to have been studious in University; I spent the first 18 months as an out of control kid whose parents were suddenly a continent away. My point was that the US Collage student who I met then (we spent near two month in the States circa summer 2005 Columbia and Harvard) seemed to have less pressure and far more free time then we did. I was also quite jealous as they seemed to be getting a more rounded education than we were; they could study Greek Lit and Philosophy if they so desired and I would dearly have loved to; instead of having to decipher Land Law.
The “Old AS” and the new “AS” are different. The old AS-Levels were a qualifications higher than O and less than “A”. The current scheme introduced as part of Curriculum 2000. Bascially “A-Levels” are now split into two parts; the first year is known as the “AS” exam and the second as the “A2”. AS and A2 are modules of the final A-Level qualification.
So for A-Level Maths you needed to clear 4 papers; two Pure Maths papers and at least one of Statistics and Mechanics.
The way it was split was this
P1(AS)
S1(AS)
P3(A2)
M1(A2)
So you would give P1 and S1 in the first year and then give P3 and M1 in the second year for the full A-Level, otherwise you would only have a AS-Level. P3 and M1 are and remain MUCH harder than P1 and S1; I remember coming out of my P1 paper thinking that my Additional Maths paper that I had taken two years previously had been more difficult.
As the change around came into force the year I started A-Levels; 2001, I remember it very well. At that time overseas students were allowed the option doing the two year exam or the new system and most choose the former. This finished in 2005 (I think).
Correct. My education section on my CV lists the number of O Levels and A levels I attained, plus my degree.
Back in my day, O Levels were graded from A-E, with A-C being regarded as a pass. Similarly with A Levels.
Also, different grades at A Level are assigned a 'point’s value (A grade = 120 points, B = 100 points, etc) and Universities will usually offer you a place subject to you achieving a certain points total (eg 300) or grade levels (I was offered a place on the basis of achieving a minimum ABB in my 3 A Levels). Beyond University, the grades you achieved don’t really matter as long as they were a pass.
AK84 writes:
> My point was that the US Collage student who I met then (we spent near two
> month in the States circa summer 2005 Columbia and Harvard) seemed to have
> less pressure and far more free time then we did. I was also quite jealous as
> they seemed to be getting a more rounded education than we were; they could
> study Greek Lit and Philosophy if they so desired and I would dearly have loved
> to; instead of having to decipher Land Law.
If the only college students you talked to were ones who went to Columbia or Harvard, then they weren’t typical at all of American college students. The ones you talked to were the ones who did extremely well in high school. They had been pushed very hard for at least the previous four years (and probably also pushed hard for most of their childhood) and could now slow down a little. Furthermore, is what you’re saying is that you were starting to study law courses in your first year of university rather than being able to put it off until after you got a bachelor’s degree? (I think that’s what you’re saying but I’m not sure. Did you get a law degree? It would really help if you explained things more carefully.) Consider what one of those Columbia or Harvard students who wanted to become a lawyer would have to do for the next four years. They would have to major in an academic area that might have some chance of impressing a law school admissions board (and they would have to take a fair amount of diversity courses in other subjects). If they wanted to get into a top law school (and most of them do), they would have to get extremely good grades in their courses. Even to get into a second-rate law school, they would have get reasonably good grades. Yeah, students at those colleges get to study something other than law for those four years, but they really have to excel at whatever they study in college in order to get into professional schools (i.e., law or med or whatever school) or grad school.
Second, those students were wildly untypical of average American college students. If you watch too many bad American TV shows or movies, you will get the idea that the following things are true of nearly all college students:
- They attend a four-year college as soon as they enter college.
- That college is a selective private one.
- They go to college immediately after high school.
- They all graduated from high school in the normal way, rather than quitting and later studying in night school or passing the GED.
- They go to college full-time and aren’t working at a job full-time or part-time.
- They are single with no children.
- They go to college for four years straight and thus graduate four years after high school.
- They seldom flunk out.
- They live on campus.
- They belong to fraternities or sororities.
- Even if they don’t belong to a fraternity or a sorority, they go to lots of drunken parties.
- They have plenty of time to go to college athletic events, and a lot of them play on college athletic teams.
- They are majoring in liberal arts subjects.
None of these are true of nearly all American college students. The percent of American college students that all of these are true of is very small. I was going to say that this is closer to what college students were like in 1950, but even that isn’t true. In 1950 there were a lot of students not long out of the military who were studying in college using money from the GI Bill. Perhaps it would be closer to say that this is what college students were like in 1930.
A lot of American college students took several years off before going to college. Sometimes they took a lot of years off. Many of them enlisted in the military and used their GI Bill benefits after they left the military to help pay for college. Some of them dropped out of high school and only later graduated from night school or took the GED. Many of them are going to college part-time. Many are working full-time at a job. Many of them have a spouse who is working full-time allowing them to put in more hours at college. Many (perhaps most) of them live off-campus. Often they can only graduate after studying for a couple of years, taking a couple of years off to earn more money at some job, and then going back to college.
Many of them are going to two-year community colleges hoping that they will get good enough grades to be admitted into a decent state university. Nearly all of them are going to state- (or city- or county-) supported colleges. Most of the others are going to only moderately selective private colleges. Some of them are going to for-profit colleges (which often will take anybody and have absolutely terrible graduation rates). The percentage of them who are going to the really famous, top-rated, extremely selective colleges is quite small.
Only ten percent of them ever join a fraternity or sorority. With all the time they have to spend on their jobs and families, many of them have no time to go to college athletic events, other non-academic events, or even to parties. Even the ones who have no family to support and don’t have to work during college don’t usually have much time for non-academic events.
A lot of them (perhaps about half) flunk out and many more drop out and take a while off. This isn’t entirely because they spend too much time partying. They are often exhausted from their jobs and the time they spend with their families. They often didn’t really learn much in hgh school and didn’t acquire good study habits. Some of them just aren’t smart enough to cut it. Some of them come back to college later and usually do well enough to graduate.
A little less than a third of them are majoring in a liberal arts subject. For the purposes of this discussion, a liberal arts major is one in humanities (literature, philosophy, languages, art history, etc.), social sciences (anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, political science, etc.), or natural science (physics, chemistry, biology, math, etc.). Instead, they are studying education (i.e., preparing to be elementary or high school teachers), business, engineering, nursing, medical technology, and a host of other things that you probably didn’t even realize were possible college majors, like computer game design. So the number of American college students who are getting the rounded college education that you talk about is actually rather small.
Indeed. I took my A Levels in 1992 and have four of them. I was one of only a handful that did more than three and the fourth one, Further Mathematics, was studied for in free periods, lunchtimes and during PE times (which was a big decision for me as I played both rugby and cricket for the school). I was only allowed to do it as I had demonstrated an ability in Mathematics. Not sure quite how I did, seeing as I did poorly in my AS as I mentioned earlier, but I must have somehow as I went on to study it at University.
Interesting. Thanks for the correction.
I was mostly kept away from a lot of this as well as I went to a private Catholic school. I was never subject to the national curriculum, for example. Hell, I never got to grips with the idea of “year one, year two etc”, I was still in the world of head boys, houses and upper/lower sixth 
That changed later. I have GCSEs and A-Levels and then it was 10 points for an A, so my ABCD was 28 points. I wonder if this was to do with the existence of CSEs? Hell, let’s bring those in and really confuse the foreign types 