g-w1

Hey, so I wanted to start this dialogue because we were talking on Discord about the secondary school systems and college admission processes in the US vs NZ, and some of the differences were very surprising to me.

I think that it may be illuminating to fellow Americans to see the variation in pedagogy. Let's start off with grades. In America, the way school works is that you sit in class and then have projects and tests that go into a gradebook. Roughly speaking, each assignment has a max points you can earn. Your final grade for a subject is $\sum_{i} \frac{{earned}_{i}}{{max possible}_{i}}$ . Every school has a different way of doing the grading though. Some use A-F, while some use a number out of 4, 5, or 100. Colleges then use these grades as one of the main criteria in admissions. How does this work in NZ?

Malumit

In New Zealand, we have the NZQA (New Zealand Qualifications Authority) which regulate the NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Attainment).

NZQA manages three levels of exams and scholarship. The levels are numbered Level 1, 2, and 3. Level 1 is taken mainly in Year 11 (11th year of a 13 year education), Level 2 in Year 12, and Level 3 in Year 13.

You take several assessments throughout the year for each subject. These are divided by whether they are taken internally or externally. Internal exams, while standardised across New Zealand, are graded by your teacher within school. External asessments are sat by all New Zealanders at the same time and are proctored by officials outside the school.

Each assessment offers a different amount of credits and these credits can either be Achieved, Merit, or Excellence. By recieving 14 credits in a subject, you can be endorsed and this endorsement will depend on whether those credits are Achieved, Merit, or Excellence. There is also a requirement that at least some of these credits are from external exams. These certificate endorsements aren't very useful for anything.

Aside from subject-specific endorsements, you can also recieve a certificate by level and this requires a certain amount of absolute credits. For example, you can recieve a Level 1 certificate with Excellence by gaining 50 Excellence credits but either completely fail Maths or never take it. Most students take assessments totalling more than 50 credits. For me, I took assessments worth ~85 credits each year.

Finally, to gain entrance in university re

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