Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum erm, what's the point of grades?

Another less obvious purpose grades serve is they're a path to follow. Having that path of measured accomplishment keeps a lot of pianists involved in a program where's everyone's working to the same standard. That's not an endorsement of grades. Just an observation from someone from a country w/o grades who lives now in a country w/grades.

And it is as Wind says it is pretty much the same with a black belt. In most martial arts black means the holder can least demonstrate a broad set of techniques so they can instruct beginners. And really nothing more than that. But ... in some martial arts you have to demonstrate you know the techniques. AND you have to win what can be some very tough full-out matches- that the participants and adjudicators will call "fights."

Having a Grade exam pass gives a good idea of what level a pianist is at. And if the Grade is 6 or more (ABRSM), you also know that the pianist has a good understanding of music theory too, as Grade 5 Theory is required before sitting Grade 6 (or above) practical.

It's certainly more accurate than saying that someone is a 'beginner-intermediate', or 'intermediate-advanced' pianist. And the exams require that all salient aspects are covered, including aural skills and sight-reading.

Learners who opt not to do grade exams can pick and choose whether they want just to play pieces, play by ear and not learn to sight-read, or not have a basic knowledge of harmony, or how music is constructed, or how to distinguish between different intervals and chords. That's fine, if that's all they aspire to, but that won't make for a well-rounded musician.

I have a friend who started piano lessons at the age of 60, when he retired. He had planned to do grade exams, but found some aspects, including playing scales and arpeggios, and identifying intervals, too difficult to learn, so decided to play only pieces that he liked, and told his teacher accordingly. After some five years of lessons, he still can't play scales or arpeggios, and plays mainly simplified versions of Chopin Nocturnes and Waltzes, i.e. music with LH chords and slow RH melodies.

Your 60-year-old friend may get more pleasure out of faking a little Chopin now and again than he would from being better at playing scales and arpeggios and having a couple of exam certificates.

Let's me honest. Nobody is going to start ab initio at age 60 and become a well-rounded concert artist anyway. If it took him five years to produce a musically satisfying simplified Nocturne just how far do you think he'd have gotten in five years of pursuing exams?

He'd probably still be slaving away trying to master some kiddie tunes to prepare for his second exam, in all likelihood.

Are grades a recent thing? Or a non-American thing?

Or both?

I ask because I studied piano to a fairly comprehensive level, but never once took an exam so I can't give you a particular number of what "grade" I had attained. I had teachers and the later teachers were teachers that only took advancing students, etc. We covered the right things because...they were good teachers. If someone were interested in how well I played, I would describe my repertoire.

But never once did someone ask me to take an exam.

I stopped playing for a lot of years, and restarted last year and I see so much talk of exams. It appears somewhat par for the course in England, especially. My friend's son takes violin exams, and started doing so the first year he began to take classes. And these were described to me as kind of normal things--his exam process was not because he, particularly, was highly immersed in violin. I got the feeling everybody in his school class took them. I was surprised. My older daughter takes private violin lessons and has progressed to a teacher who is in the orchestra and only takes students who start from my daughter's level up to conservatory and never once has anybody suggested she take an exam. My younger daughter takes flute lessons in school, and there's no examination process. She takes private piano lessons at home and her teacher has not mentioned studying for exams.

But here and online in general? There's always talk of exams and levels and I don't know what to make of it.

So I guess my questions remain: did I somehow sidestep something that was common 25 years ago by accident? Do most people take music exams who study instruments? If I'm right and it wasn't common in the U.S. 25 years ago, has it become so now? Or is it just a non-U.S. thing? If it's a non-U.S. thing, is it also recently more common or has it always been that way?

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not anti-exam. I do wonder about over-reliance on the achievement of them, but I can see how it would provide a reliable structure for making sure you're learning things comprehensively.

And I completely agree that preparing for examination is a great way to make you organically understand the difference between learning something to an acceptable degree and truly acquiring the skill. Nothing like an exam to put the fear of god in you, huh?

But both of those things seem to be amply covered by having chosen a good teacher who you can trust to teach you comprehensively, and participating in recitals and performance opportunities that force you to truly polish up a piece.

So I still don't see, at least for me, a particular reason to seek out examinations, but I can see why one might if they aren't certain their teacher has a good grasp of the overall pedagogy of it, if they are self-taught, or if they don't have any recital opportunities.

TwoSnow',

I've wondered the same thing since joining this forum a couple years back. I gather it's a UK/Europe "thing" of long standing that has only in recent decades become established in USA teaching.

Maybe it happened at the same time that scores on standardized tests because the entire focus of primary and secondary education in this country, arguably at the ultimate expense of the students...

When I first started taking lessons (I was living in Japan), I went to a music school run by the Kawai Piano company and they have a very elaborate and comprehensive system of piano grades with different genres. The classical grades are recognized by conservatories and universities that have music degrees, so for children there's a practical element if the child (or parent) thinks the child may end up pursuing a music degree.

For me as an adult beginner at the time, I viewed the grades as a predetermined, and well-vetted, curriculum and a pedagogical tool to make sure I was learning the important and necessary elements at each step. I also have/had intense stage fright, so the grades were a way to get repeatd exposure to playing in front of people and all of that. I ultimtly didn't do very many though because the tote I played, the more music I found that I wanted to play which wasn't part of the grade curricula for any of the genres. So I stopped doing the grades because it wasn't in line with my piano goals. But I did get a lot out of doing them and I might have continued if I had been allowed to choose my own piece at each level. I should rephrase that. The student (and teacher) choose reach piece because at each grade there are several pieces that can be used for the grade exam. But I started to get into George Wintson and Yiruma etc (and eventually Nevue and Einaudi) and those composers weren't on the list! And since I've returned to the states, none of my teachers have brought up grades, and I suspected they're not involved in preparing their other students for them.

As for my own playing, while I lived in Japan I created a lot of opportunities for myself to play for friends and do little recitals, and do recordings for PW ec, so that filled in the gap left by not doing the grade exams anymore. And now I'm trying to get back into the habit of regular recording again.

Whether through exams or some other forum, I think the process of polishing a piece of music for someone other than oneself or one's teacher is invaluable, so to me the grade exams make a lot of sense, as long as doing them doesn't mean the student is putting off playing something else they'd rather play.

He's always loved classical music and has been attending piano recitals several times a month for decades, and is now regretting not having a more structured attitude towards learning the piano - which he would have if he'd learnt as per the ABRSM or any other exam syllabus (whether or not he actually took any exams).

His teacher basically taught him what he wanted, and he's realized that he's unable to play anything that involves fast runs or LH arpeggios. For someone like him (used to listening to world-class pianists in Chopin), not being able to manage more than the easy bits of Chopin Nocturnes as Chopin wrote them, after five years of playing, is a huge drawback. He's fed up of only being able to play simplified Chopin.

And he's not interested in Einaudi or that type of music either. He realized that if he'd persevered at scales, arpeggios and the like from the start, almost certainly by now he'd have aquired a more rounded technique that would have allowed him to play the complete Op.9/2 and others without resorting to cutting out the hard bits.

In the UK and many other parts of the world (including the country I come from, far, far away ), Grade exams are a given for any young musician learning classical music. For instance, to enter the BBC Young Musician Competition, the applicant needs to have at least a Distinction in Grade 8 ABRSM or equivalent on the instrument he's playing (piano/string/woodwind/brass/percussion). Examiners from the UK travel around the world to mark applicants for Grade exams - I did Grades 1 to 4 in my far, far away country. The examiners were all British.

It's only recently that there are categories other than classical for these exams, which might be why in USA, they weren't usual - because not everyone learns classical.

James Fenton says it well in his article "Five easy pieces":

"Actually taking a grade exam is, indeed, a submission to authority. One can say: this authority is, yes, arbitrary, and their grades have nothing to do with musical merit, but they are testing something; and by preparing to meet this series of arbitrary tests I am hoping to escape from the trap of circularity. My intention as an amateur is of course only to play for self and perhaps friends, but for the moment I need these periodic, terrifying encounters with an examiner, just as I need lessons. I need to break my own glass ceiling."

Complete article at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/11/featuresreviews.guardianreview14

If the teacher had insisted on your friend practicing technique (whether or not as part of a test syllabus), your friend might simply have quit lessons or found another teacher. I don't think this is so much about whether a teacher follows a test syllabus, as whether an adult student is willing to do the nitty-gritty practice required to become a well-rounded player with an eye to long-term proficiency, or prefers to insist on only learning the short-term interesting bits.

It's perhaps also about whether teachers insist on their adult students following a well-rounded path of learning. Apparently your friend's teacher did not. But reports from the teacher's forum are that there are many many adult students who only want to learn what they think interests them, rather than submitting to a serious course of piano study. This is perhaps not typical of the pianists here in the ABF, but we are a self-selected group. So who knows whether your friend's teacher wanted to teach him more technique but acceded to your friend's insistence to not do that, or whether the teacher wouldn't have taught technique at all even if given a willing student.

It's certainly a lot easier if an adult learner is keen on following an exam syllabus with a view to doing maybe one or two exams, for the teacher to get the student to practise the technical stuff, learn to identify simple intervals, sight-read music, practise at rhythms etc.

But if all thoughts of doing any exams are banished, you have the situation where the student is twice the age of his teacher (as my friend is), and knows what he wants - or thinks he knows what he wants. How can the teacher persuade him that practising the C major scale and arpeggio is a good idea when what he really wants is to get to the interesting stuff, like Chopin's Nocturnes (of which he has Rubinstein's recordings lodged in his memory), when there aren't any C major scales or arpeggios in them?

You're right - if his teacher had insisted on a solid grounding in technique and other aspects of overall musicality from the start, even though exams weren't on the agenda, my friend would have found someone else to teach him. He was previously a high-flying executive in a major multi-national company. He knows his own mind, and is used to hiring and firing.

Even if exams were on the agenda, it seems very likely your friend would have refused to do them, or the prep related to them, and gotten another teacher.

On the flip side, many people on the ABF say they only practice technique as it arises in their pieces, and are satisfied with their progress with this approach. Is that a possibility for your friend?

+1
The student chose not to study theory, scales, arps, etc, and his teacher respected his choice.

However, those things can be studied whether or not one chooses to participate in grades and grade exams. They are independent variables.


The most obvious reason, to me, to do grades is to provide a benchmark--an imperfect benchmark, but a benchmark nevertheless. People look around and want to know where they stand with respect to others, whether they will admit it or not. It's basic human nature, imo.

Having watched him play, it seems to me that he finds the act of getting his thumb beneath other fingers awkward and unnatural, and avoids it. Five years on, having learnt to play many pieces - all of his own choosing, most of them simplified for him by his teacher, precisely to avoid these awkward movements - it seems unlikely he'll ever overcome this hurdle.

Not unless he changes his mindset, and let his teacher take control over his pianistic development.

I guess that's the difference between an adult learner who knows what he wants, and someone who will relinquish control to his teacher in the belief that the latter will guide him towards his ultimate goal in the optimum way. I once met his teacher, and he told me that about half his students are adult beginners. He never pushed exams onto them, but he has noticed that those who wanted to do exams - even if just one or two of the early grades - almost always acquired a better all-round technique and musicality than those who had no interest in exams, simply because they were more willing to put in the hours towards acquiring the basics required to pass the exams.

In a sense, it's them passing some control over what they should learn over to their teachers, because obviously their teachers are the ones who will know what's required to pass. Whereas, if there is no set goal within a set time period other than just being able to play the music you want, the lessons will invariably be devoted solely towards learning those pieces. And if problems arise with a small section of a particular piece, it's far easier just to simplify it so that you can get the piece finished, rather than take weeks to acquire the technique to get through that section.

bennevis,

It sounds like you're reckoning on the exam as somehow being respected by student much more than the student respects his teacher. Honestly that doesn't seem to make a lick of sense to me.

If my teacher tries to convince me that doing some scale and arpeggio drills are necessary to play my favorite type of music but I refuse to do it, why on earth would it be more convincing to say I need to do the drills to prepare for an exam I have no interest in taking?

My teacher convinced me that scales and arpeggios were absolute musts if I wanted to play classical music. She let me struggle through Mozart's Turkish March and when I quickly hit a wall, told me, "if you want to play movie tunes and pop music, you can avoid scales, if you want to play this, get busy."

I don't know what interactions your friend had with his teacher, but I hope the teacher at least made the case early on that there is a price to be paid down the road for taking short cuts earlier on. If your friend made an informed decision, then the teacher did the best they could.

And since my epiphany, I've come to the conclusion that if I have an hour to practice a piece, I actually make more progress if I spend about 1/3rd of that time on scales and arpeggios rather than purely focusing on the piece. I don't know if this is common for others, or whether it even makes sense, but it works for me and I'm sticking to it.

As for the exams, I've no interest in taking them, and I feel I am getting a well rounded enough education as it is. I have, however, grudgingly agreed to participating in the recitals my teacher sets up for her students, I think all of whom are kids.

I had piano lessons for seven years when I was a lad; with three different teachers, but when my parents found I was more interested in playing Rugby they relented and I was allowed to give up, something I've regretted ever since. So, when my youngest granddaughter, now aged nine, showed an interest in playing my piano I encouraged her, we found a good teacher who put her in for the ABRSM exams. Anyway, she recently passed her ABRSM Grade 1 Piano Exam..With Distinction!, she has now gained more incentive to play and practice for Grade 2.....she won't be falling down as I did.

I think you've misunderstood my post (or maybe you didn't read it properly). And my whole point.

What I said (and what that teacher also implied) in its essentials is that if a student is committed to doing Grade exams, he realizes he has to do what's necessary to pass them - unlike a child, an adult won't waste money paying for an exam and then not doing the work required to pass it. Even if he thinks it's drudgery, even when what he really wants is to play Chopin.

Whereas if all you want to do is to play one of Chopin's easiest nocturnes, and there's just a couple of bars with filigree stuff that you can't manage because you haven't developed the requisite technique, it's all too easy to get your teacher to simplify it down just so you can play the whole thing. After all, you only play what you want, don't you? Would you really spend a few months to achieve finger fluency just for a few seconds of music when you're only playing purely for your own pleasure and nothing else? (Have a look at Chopin's Op.9/2 to see what I mean, if you don't know what I'm talking about - there are at least another couple of Nocturnes like that).

If you still don't get my point, think of the driving test. In the UK, there's the three-point turn which you have to to do as part of the test. Many drivers never use that, once they've passed the test - there're ways of avoiding it. If it wasn't a requirement of the driving test, how many drivers would take the trouble to master it? After all, one can still drive safely on the road without being able to do that turn. But if you come across a situation where it's required, there's almost always an alternative - like finding another place to park, or driving off and making a few extra turns.

I think we're just conceptualizing the cause and effect differently. I certainly agree that someone who commits to taking a series of exams and preparing well for them will end up practicing many things that your friend did not practice. But then again that person would be perfectly capable of committing the practice without the exams. It's the commitment that matters, not the exams.

My wife had a roommate just after college. The roommate and her boyfriend kept splitting up and getting back together. The roommate kept complaining that if her stupid boyfriend would just ask her to marry him, they wouldn't be splitting up all the time and the boyfriend would quit cheating on her constantly.

The exam thing is kind of like marriage. It can make a lot of sense for someone who IS committed. But exams can't force someone who ISN'T committed to do all the things a committed person would do.