If you don't know; Standard Grades are the method of assessing pupils aged 14-16 in Scotland, and every candidate sits 8 subjects in this time period. You can sit standard grades at 2 of three levels.

Credit; 1
2

General; 3
4

Foundation; 5
6

1 is the highest award you can achieve in any given subject, and 6 is the lowest. Everyone sits the general exam, but depending on the level you are at, you can sit foundation or credit as well as it. The general exam acts like a safety net if you fail the credit. The foundation also acts like a safety net if you fail the general.


Now, this is why it is crap:

Any grade below a level 3 is worthless. You cannot continue your secondary education unless you push your guidance team into letting you, otherwise you have to leave school, basically. (either go to college or just bum about afterwards)

Subjects such as French, English, German, Art, Graphic Communication, Craft and Design and Computing all have a folio of work collected throughout the course that is sent away at the same time as the exams. The grade of your folio is added to your exam grade to give you a final mark for the end of the course. Now, this means you can fuck up your final exam, and still achieve a 1 in certain subjects, even if you got a 3 in your exam for some reason.

Other subjects however, like Maths, History and Geography, don't have a folio, so your exam is your only chance really to show your stuff. If you screw it up, your only other option is to appeal for a higher grade at the expense of lots of paper work and teacher involvement.

The second reason why it's crap;

For the History exam, you have an hour and 45 minutes to write about 11 pages (in my case anyway) worth of answers, which total up to about 24 Knowledge & Understanding marks and 33 Enquiry Skills marks. Most people are writing frantically right up to the last second to try and finish the damn thing.


Now, today in my computing exam, I had one hour of doing jack shit because I'd finished. So I think, okay, not a big deal, I've just maybe missed out a back page or something - but no, everyone else is sitting there, finished. We wait, for an hour, doing nothing. It's totally unbalanced.

The varying degrees of work you have to do to achieve a 1 is recidulous too. The art examiners are such a bunch of elitist snobs with sticks rammed up their arseholes that only about 6-9 people out of like 60 candidates get a 1 for their final grade. That's like, 11% ish. In other subjects like Computing and Chemistry you get almost double or even triple that getting a 1 because it's all ticky boxes and fill in the blanks.

Ha, and get this. They put a question in the Maths Credit exam that we were actually unable to do, because it wasn't even from our course. It was from the Higher syllabus (Higher being the next course level up from Standard Grade) and all the teachers have agreed it's totally stupid to try and get us to answer something we have no clue about. I totally screwed up that exam and right now I'm too angry to care.

Standard Grades must be shit 'cause they are abolishing them in a few years anyway. Therefore, my point is proved.


Anyway. On a lighter note, collarbone is healed - gonna go back horse riding when June comes, gonna get back on that bugger that chucked me off and finish what I started