A-levels

Education in the States is fairly straightforward:
- Nursery school (or pre-kindergarten) for 3-4 year old
- K-12 (usually referred to as elementary school, junior high, and high school) for 5-18 year olds
- A 4-year bachelor's degree
- A 2-year master's degree

Education in England starts in a similar way:
- Nursery school for 3-4 year olds
- Primary school for 5-10 year olds
- Secondary school for 11-13 year olds

Now it gets weird, because at 14 you start studying for your GCSEs -- General Certificate of Secondary Education.  These are specialist subjects of the student's choice, and they can take as many (or as few) as they like, with most opting for 8-10 subjects such as English, mathematics, science, religious education, physical education, citizenship, and a foreign language.

At the end of year 11 (at age 15) you take your GCSEs and are given a grade from A-G, although for all practical purposes anything below a C is a fail.  Now this is important because in England, compulsory education ends at 16, and you generally need five GCSEs (with a grade of A–C) to take your A-levels in sixth form.

Still with me? 

A-levels is the Advanced Level General Certificate of Education (there used to be an O-level, for ordinary, but that was phased out), and again these are student-selected topics such as English, biology, mathematics, psychology, and the oddly named "General Studies."  Typically a student will study for 3 A-levels, as that is the minimum for university admission  ("Sixth form" is just a holdover name from a previous education scheme, but there are specialist schools you can go to study for your A-levels.)

After two years of study, students take their A-level exams and anxiously await the results because, at that point, they've already applied to various universities and been made offers contingent on their grades.  For example, a university might offer a physics degree to a student if he gets a B in Mathematics, a B in Physics and a C in Computing.  A-levels are a national rite of passage, much more so than a high school graduation.  (If you don't meet your required scores, you can take the exams again the following year, but that's like taking 12th grade over.)

Interestingly, there is only one private university in England--all of the rest are public institutions, and they all cost exactly the same -- £3,225 (about $5,000) per year, and even that doesn't need to be paid until the student has graduated and attained a certain income level.  A bachelor's degree takes 3 years and a master's degree only takes 1, so in England you can have a master's degree in the same time as a bachelor's degree in the US.  (I have no idea about PhDs.)

When you get your bachelor's degree, you are classified as either in the "first half" of the class (1st), the "first half" of the second half (2.1) or the second half of the second half (2.2).  Oddly, most employers in the UK don't actually care what your degree was in; they just want to know you were 1st or 2.1.

I probably don't need to mention that 4 of the top 6 universities in the world are in England -- and 16 of the top 25 are in the UK -- but here's a scary statistic: Only 50% of students in England continue school past the age of 16.  There are plans to raise compulsory education to 18 by 2013, but I have no idea how that's going to affect any of the above.

Now if I could only understand the rules of cricket...