Well, he was replying to someone who said England. You can leave school at 16 (and if your school doesn’t have a sixth form then you have no choice but to leave that particular school), but you can’t completely leave education. You can also leave school at 14 and go to a vocational college (called a University Technical College) or study at an FE college that has courses for under-16s. This a fairly recent development.
The compulsory subjects at GCSE are now English language, maths, and science. (Obviously this doesn’t always apply to students with special educational needs). This is for England and Wales only, of course, because of the Scottish system being so different, and in Northern Ireland the compulsory subjects are technically English, maths and RE, though RE doesn’t have to be a full course. And NI still has the A*-F grading.
RE = Religious Education (I know what that sounds like, but the actuality of it might well be different from what you might expect. It certainly was in Scotland when I was at school - comparative religion stuff, and musings on what it means to be good iirc. No idea about NI though)
This is interesting to me. My undergrad degree is in philosophy but I went to grad school for mechanical engineering. And no, it wasn’t an easy transition.
I had way more math and lab science than most people expect of someone with a philosophy degree, but I still had to take three undergrad engineering courses and one math class (linear algebra). That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was paying for it.
You can’t get federal loans or grants in the US for a second undergrad degree, so it was much cheaper for me to get a master’s degree (paid for by teaching and/or working in a lab).
The mechanical engineering department was deeply skeptical of my background, so I marched my liberal-arts ass across the street to the engineering physics department. They were more reasonable and a whole lot more interesting.
My department routinely accepted students with math or physics undergrad degrees who wanted to do applied math and applied physics. The engineering physics department valued creative problem-solving from first principles, while the ME department focused more on the plug-and-chug approach. My department and my cohort both had a certain island-of-misfit-toys vibe. It was fantastic.
In the end, I paid cash for two semesters of undergrad catch-up and then paid with sweat for my MS (via teaching and research). I’m glad I did it, but I definitely had to blaze my own trail (and come up with about $12,000).
Art does. Chemistry doesn’t, exactly. There are controlled practical assessments, but they don’t count towards the grade. Same for biology and physics.
Here in the U.S., I majored in English and minored in history and philosophy. You might think of it as the trifecta of useless subjects, but it worked well for me, and I’d do it again. Each of the three subjects broadened and deepened my understanding of the others. Is my understanding correct that in England, I’d perhaps have matriculated with more coursework in English but less in history and philosophy?
If you mean the qualifications to enter university, you’d be unlikely to have done any formal programme and examination in Philosophy at school, though it might be referred to, and you might be encouraged to read some basic introduction as background.
You wouldn’t be assessed for either A-level or a university degree to any great extent on coursework rather than final examination, though university degrees might allow coursework in some form, or a dissertation, to contribute some proportion of the final overall assessment.
I think it’s worth pointing out that, although academic education is traditionally more specialised at an earlier stage than AIUI in the US, there are many university first degree programmes that offer combinations of subjects or encourage some extra diversity (and sometimes using the major/minor terminology).:But that would be within planned limits. Most wouldn’t allow a completely free cafeteria option.
In order to take that combo, you’d have to find a university offering it as a set course or one of the very few that allow you to mix and match- like the Open university ‘Open Degree’, or a few ‘Combined Honours’ or ‘Liberal Arts’ degrees.
Courses consisting of two different subjects are not all that rare (English and History is certainly available), but very few places would allow you to combine 3 topics, and I think the Open Uni is the only one that will allow you to study 3 different subjects after the first year, or just add a random module that looks interesting to an otherwise unrelated programme of study. You can sit in lectures for unrelated stuff in many universities, but just for interest, you can’t usually make it count as part of your course.
The Open University is a bit different anyway, being a correspondence university that will, as the name suggests, take any applicants into entry level modules, where you sign up for each module independently, whereas in most UK universities you would sign up for a programme of study, with maybe a few choices to specialise, but choices between set options. The Open Uni is not a scam place however; everyone can join, far from everyone who signs up and pays up graduates.
This is a really informative response. I especially like the clearing system.
But… why are these tests taken in August? Or are they taken earlier and simply marked in August? I would have thought these tests should be taken during the school year.
The exams are taken during the school year - usually in late May, early June. The marking process in both England and Scotland is a bit of a badly-funded binfire as far as I can tell.
You sit the exams at the end of the school year in May and June. You get the results in August. All results are issued simultaneously on a single day.
To go into a bit more detail on the whole “choosing a major” thing, I’ll give you my experience. Things have probably changed a bit in the last 35 years (yikes) but won’t have changed that much. In Scotland, we have a three tier system - in my day it was O Grades, then Highers, then Sixth Year Studies. O Grades were equivalent to English O levels, Sixth Year Studies equivalent to A Levels, and Highers somewhere inbetween.
In fourth year (my eleventh year in education, I turned sixteen at the end of it) I sat eight O levels:
English, Maths, Arithmetic, Physics, Chemistry, French, History, Music
In fifth year I sat five Highers:
English, Maths, Physics, French, Music
I stayed on to sixth year and did two different Maths papers at Sixth Year Studies level. I also did Higher Modern Studies, redid Higher English (I only got a C first time), and filled up my timetable by adding an O Grade Secretarial Studies (where I learned to touch type, probably the single most useful thing I learned that year).
At some point in Sixth Year - can’t remember when - the University application process started. I applied to a handful of Scottish Universities to study Maths and Computing Science. Based on my Higher results, I got an unconditional offer from Aberdeen, a conditional offer from Edinburgh requiring A grades in the two additional Highers I was sitting, and a conditional offer from St Andrews with really stiff requirements in the Highers and Sixth Year Studies I was sitting. I took the easy route and took the unconditional offer from Aberdeen so I knew what I was doing and where I was going.
In first year you had to do four modules - I chose Maths, Computing Science, Statistics and Music. None of them were classed as a “Major”. I was in the science faculty, heading for a BSc. Most of the friends I made were all in the Arts faculty, and they only had to do three modules.
Second year it trimmed down to three modules - Maths, Computing Science and Numerical Analysis.
Only by third year did you really have to specialise. In Scotland you could graduate with an Ordinary degree at the end of year three, or do another year to make it an Honours degree.
I got an unconditional from Edinburgh after my Higher results, and I could have gone then. There was no way in any shape or form that I was mature enough to do so though!
So sixth year was very much pressure-off, and I did CSYS Physics and Chemistry, and somehow got talked into doing three Maths papers. :dubious:
With the pressure off, sixth year at school was a period of doing a lot of growing up. The teachers treated you like an adult, for a start, and there’s all the usual late teenage stuff going on as well. The first couple of terms at uni were pretty straightforward too - the CSYS syllabus for Physics, and some of the Maths stuff, covered a lot of the same ground so the jump wasn’t too hard.
I think the old Scottish system was probably the ideal way into higher education, quite frankly. Add in the fact I qualified for a full grant, could claim Housing Benefit to cover accommodation (never stayed in halls), and could sign on in the summer months…
That was back when less than 10% of the population went to university. It’s massively more difficult for kids nowadays, it’s a big financial commitment, and the expectation is that around 50% of school-leavers will enter higher education, so the job market is adjusted correspondingly.
You know what value my physics degree from a decent university gave me when it came to my first job, for a company I stayed at for a couple of decades, and did very well out of?
“Is numerate”. Honestly, my Higher and CSYS results demonstrated that.
Of almost equal importance was my address, which hit one of their must-have criteria at the time:
This has been an amazing thread and thanks for all the responses.
One other question: what is revision? I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos on the English education system the past couple of days.
To me as an American, revision is when I’d write an essay or a paper and then take a second look at it the next day and usually get input from friends or classmates.
Is revision in England basically the same as studying? I hear a lot of talk about ‘revision period.’ We never really had one in American high school although often you’d get the last class period before finals as an open day to just study for the midterm or final. If you chose to read comic books, well, that’s your decision.
In college, we had a few days, including a weekend, to get ready for finals. The dorms were pretty strict about noise enforcement during that time as well, even on a Saturday night.
Specifically “revision” means going over what you have already studied, with a view to making sure it’s in your “live” memory in time for an examination - and depending on your teachers some work on exam strategies and techniques (working through past exam papers to get a sense of what sorts of questions might be asked, for one thing, and working how you can frame your answers to show off how the work you’ve done relates to what they’ve asked - that sort of thing).
If we’re swapping histories, I went to a very academically-oriented grammar school, where they put the top streams through the “basic” five O-levels a year early, at 15 it so - in my case, English Language, Maths, French, Latin and Physics, and a second set of 5 a year later (EngLit, Additional Maths, i e., differential equations and all that, Music, German and History). After that it was languages all the way through A-levels (EngLit, French and German, but I still regret not having been able to carry on with History as well) and the Cambridge entrance exams. But that was mumblety-odd years ago.
Thank you ma’am The Maths papers thing didn’t really equate to three separate qualifications tho. If I remember rightly there were six options under the CSYS Maths umbrella, and I took three of them. Not as much commitment needed as the Physics or Chemistry courses by a long way, maybe a course and a half between them.
Well, I always have, and always will, count my CSYS Maths Paper I and Paper II as two separate qualifications. Not that it really matters after all these years.
But we just go to prove that the Dope really is populated by smart people
The Maths papers thing didn’t really equate to three separate qualifications tho. If I remember rightly there were six options under the CSYS Maths umbrella, and I took three of them. Not as much commitment needed as the Physics or Chemistry courses by a long way, maybe a course and a half between them.