Ordinary Wizarding Level

[lotusbiosm]

So, with Harry Potter 6 coming out soon (July 16th!), my boss and I have taken to discussing Harry Potter often. I am sending out a request to my friends list, full of interesting and educated people. I feel certain that O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s have some sort of analagous counterpart in the English/British school system, but I, being a Yank, don't really understand said system. I see vague references to "A-Levels" and such, but I don't know what they are. Could any of you explain it to me? Pretty please?

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

OWLS - O levels which became GCSEs in 1988. These are the public exams one takes at 16+. You can leave school without them, but you need a minimum of 5, including Maths and English, to get into university. NEWTS - A levels. These are taken two years later, so at 17/18. They have changed, recently, to become mostly modular courses with minor exams halfway. The O stood for Ordinary (those too 'thick' to take O levels took CSEs, incidentally; now everyone takes GCSEs but there are different levels of paper; you can only get an A by taking the highest level); the A stands for Advanced.

There are other qualifications you can take while at school, sixth form college, or other Further Education establishment, e.g. City and Guilds (vocational qualification, sometimes regarded as equivalent to 2 A levels); the International Baccalaureate (broader base of subjects, more comparable to a US High School diploma); OND and HND BTEC qualifications, RSAs... all but IB are vocational though, so you would rarely need to know more about them.

I have: O levels, A levels, GCSEs, an RSA, a City and Guilds, some of which I did at technical college rather than school. I was just the right age to slip in an O level before they became obsolete - the current GCSE cohort were born after O levels were abandoned. Now I feel old.

[lotusbiosm.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I knew I could count on you to explain it!
I suppose in New York we have something roughly similar, in that we have Regents exams, which everyone now has to take (they used to be optional, and you could get a Regents diploma, which you needed to get into college, or a regular, non-Regents diploma, which would satisfy having a high school degree), and we have Advanced Placement exams, which aren't required, but entirely optional, but can get you college credit. But Regents exams are taken at the end of certain courses (11th grade English, 3rd foreign language, every year of math, every science, US History, and Global Studies [or whatever they're calling it now, it's a 2 year world history course]), so I took my first Regents exams at 13 (because I was "accelerated" and so started high school math and science in 8th grade instead of 9th).
Of course, they've changed a lot of organization in the relatively short time since I graduated. And they took analogies off of the SATs too. By the time my kids get to high school, it will probably be nothing like what it was when I was there (except for the social nightmares that are a high school universal).

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course our younger children now have SATs too, and they're always talking about revising the 16/18 exams - latest talk is that we will switch to an IB/US Diploma style qualification. Ho hum. Every time we get a new Education Minister we get a new Grand Scheme, I think. :)

I would have loved the AP system, I think. At 13 I was motivated. By 17 I was sooooo pissed off with the whole thing, because there was very little room to stretch pupils under the original implementation of GCSEs. It was all about creating a level playing field, which really did no one any favours.

We have to think about this soon for smallclanger, of course. In theory he can start formal education in Sept 2006, urk!