<p>I am an international student studying A Level in the UK and intend to apply to the US for higher education next year. I heard that A Level students are under disadvantage since US colleges do not understand our system. Could anybody provide me some information of how US schools read the scores- the specific UMS (percentile sores) or just the band (A*, A,B...) and how rigorous A Level is compared to AP and IB.</p>
<p>First, let me briefly introduce the A Level for those who don't really know about it. The whole UK has 3 exam boards for the A Level: AQA, Edexcel and OCR. For a subject, students take exams from only board(usually the school will select which one). The raw scores then are transformed into a UMS by percentiles, which means if you have 90% in an exam, you are better than 90% of all UK students who take the same exam by the same board, not just in your school. The number of students choosing each board are approximately the same so it's not a matter of which board is better; they are just different in the paper format.</p>
<p>What worries me is that US schools don't appreciate the difficulty of the program. We focus heavily on intensive study in a few subjects so typically, a student would take 4 subject. It would look very trivial compared to 6 IB subjects and several APs. However, as I read through my friend's AP calculus, it's all covered in just half of our first year. The second year Further Mathematics here will cover much of the second year in university. Besides, A Level offers subjects that US schools don't such as Economics and Business Study.</p>
<p>Our school does the A Level system and of course US unis understand the system! They have been accepting students for ages.
And the over-covering of syllabus thing, you can use your A level grades to transfer credits and skip some classes.</p>
<p>US universities don’t look so much at A-Level final results, but your term grades throughout the year for your A-Level courses. Same goes for your GCSEs.</p>
<p>How about the fact that A Level students study much fewer subjects than students in the US especially IB students? Will it be a problem?
And do US colleges view the score as weighted or unweighted?
Thanks!</p>
<p>I wouldn’t stress, most countries outside of the US that don’t do IB use a similar system.</p>
<p>For example, I come from Victoria, Australia, and we use the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). We study a minimum of 4, and usually about 6 subjects in-depth. This is similar to the other states, except they call their boards different names :P</p>
<p>Some people also do university subjects in their final year. The maths I took in year 10 is about comparable to AP Calculus AB, and one of the maths I took in year 11 is similar to Calc BC. My other year 11/12 maths and the uni maths I took in year 12 are about similar to first-year and second-year US university, respectively. Some also take subjects such as Accounting, which is similar in scope to a first-year uni subject. Reviewing the AP courses, our sciences are also much more in-depth and difficult.</p>
<p>We rank on a percentile system four-fold: you are ranked within school assessments for each subject, then ranked nation-wide in your subject, then your subject is ranked in difficulty against the others (i.e. “scaled” so e.g. specialist maths, LOTE = +12 points, art = -5 points), then your ‘scaled’ scores are added up and that is ranked against the entire country to form an Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank, where 99.95 is the highest, and means you are in the top 0.05% of the country.</p>
<p>What I’m trying to illustrate in not the complexity of our respective systems, but how easy it is to see the results. It is a definitive guide to university entrance, and is similar in every country except the US. The AdComs understand this.</p>