Talk:Scottish Certificate of Education

Attribution
Much of this article is derived from an older version of the O-grade article; I'm not claiming this as entirely my own work. As the content was rather more generic than an article on 'O-Grades' would warrant, and as there was no article on the Scottish Certificate of Education, I moved it here.

Fourohfour 16:14, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Public/Private Grading
From personal recollection, Ordinary Grade certificates issued in 1967 listed only pass or fail, but the mark bands (e.g. 50 - 60%) were given to the schools. At some later date grades were also printed on the certificates. In 1968 grading of Higher Grade passes was quite recent, and the schools still received more detailed banding information, which I presume was not passed on to employers or universities. This shift from ungraded pass/fail to publicly graded results in Scotland took place much later than for the English A levels.

Anonymisation
I don't know if I am accurate in my recollection, but I think in the SCE exams the candidate had to write his/her name in a box on the front sheet which could be covered later to allow anonymous marking. I was surprised to discover that this was not a feature of GCE A level exams.

Other differences from GCE
The SCEs were not in themselves accepted by the older Scottish universities: instead up to 1968 or 1969 candidates had to send their results to a joint board which issued an "Attestation of Fitness" which listed the examination passes they had approved. They did not accept Ordinary Level Arithmetic as a university qualifying subject: I don't know if practical subjects were excluded also.

The SCE Examination Board issued "Preliminary" examination papers on the same syllabus, which schools could use for their own internal exams ("first prelims" and "second prelims") in December and March. These were invigilated in the same way as the public exams, and those who were unable to take the public exams through injury or illness could get aegrotat passes instead on the basis of these.

There were no resit exams at the end of the calendar year, but the Scottish Universities Preliminary Examinations were available before the start of the university term and the subjects appeared to have an identical syllabus.

Schools had external invigilators during SCE exams: these could be local clergymen, and school teachers other than the headmaster/rector would not usually be found in the examination rooms. This was not the case for GCE A Levels. NRPanikker 17:29, 26 August 2007 (UTC)