This is incredibly of no significance, but I just felt like telling people. We took our state writing assesments today and the prompt was write a letter to persuade someone to read a certain book, so I wrote to persuade people to read Bartimaeus, I was surprised... it was the easiest thing I ever wrote... Bartimaeus is so good, it is easy to write about. We were given 75 mins and I took all 75 and wrote three pages worth of "why you should read this trilogy"... but It may have just been easy because last week we had to write about an invention we would make and how it would benefit people.. gah that one was hard.

We have unlimited time on ours.

And I had a prompt about meeting a person from the past.

I wrote about Napoleon, and got a 4 which is the highest you can on mine.

Thats cool, we don't get our scores until next year I think, so I won't know how I did.

Goodluck, I'm sure you did well.

We get ours the opposite semster. I took mine first, it came back second. If I had taken it this semster I'd have to wait till next year.

I had to choose what type of writing to do about a sea survival guide. I chose to do original writing. I did a diary entry on a boat that sinks at sea and i wrote it from the view of a man who had read a survival guide book :P i got decent marks...a B + i think.

You get letter grades on your state writing exam?

All UK government exams are graded with letters.

That's cool.

All ours are graded with numbers. The Writing Exam is 1-4 and the other tests, like Biology is 0-500. 300 is passing, 500 is perfect.

wow. I always thought America marked in letters.

We do, for normal tests.

I get As and stuff all the time. It might be different for other states, but we do numbers. Kind of like the ACT or SAT if you know what that is.

Indeed. We had numbers for our SATS. 1 - 7 in Third year.

I'm not totally familar with your educational systems.

Your SATs are used to get into college, right?

SATs are the pointless exams that exist only to serve government statistics, taken at six/seven, ten/eleven, and thirteen/fourteen, I believe (different exams each time of course). Then, GCSEs are taken at fifteen/sixteen and are used for getting into sixth form college. A levels are taken over two years, from sixteen to eighteen, and are for getting into uni and to some extent getting jobs.

Your SATs are our state exams, if I can compare.

Thanks for answering my questions.

What she said^

We get numbers also, I think they are 1-4, and math 1-5
Our SATs have to be taken in order to go to college.

And your colleges are what the rest of the world calls universities, right?

Yep. Some of them are called Universties in the title, like The University of South Michigan (not sure if that's a college, making it up).

But for some reason we call them colleges, don't know why.

College

I don't know if that helps at all.

Thanks, Adele.

I was always curious about that.

Ah, right, I see. The sub-schools within Oxford and Cambridge universities in the UK are called colleges (there's loads in each uni), but the US standard seems to expand the meaning a lot.