My Music Craft Exam Results

Hi everyone.

Well, it’s all over, and I now have my results. I must say, I did not do as well as I thought I would do!

Having said that, ‘doing well’ to me meant getting 100% in all five exams. I could not see any reason why this should not happen, since I studied hard and, well, I’m a teacher.

Interestingly, had I not studied, and tried to do the exams based on my general music knowledge as a piano teacher and theory specialist of 20 years, there is NO WAY I would have got anywhere near the following marks:

Where I lost marks:

Second Grade Aural (0.5 marks lost):

I was devasted to find that I had lost marks in this aural exam. It appears that the answer ‘guitar’ was not good enough... ‘electric guitar’ was required. I take issue with this. The question was not very specific, it just asked for the instruments heard. ‘Guitar’ is not wrong;  no-one says ‘I play acoustic guitar’, they just say ‘I play guitar’. If I had heard an electric guitar, I would probably have written down ‘electric’ but even so I think it’s a bit mean to lose marks over this.

Second Grade Written (2.5 marks lost):

I lost 1.5 marks due to incorrect naming of notes. I’m prepared to bet that it’s unlikely I got such a simple thing as the note names wrong; it’s more likely that the answers required were ‘e1’, ‘g2 ‘etc. I can tell this because the answers I got right were the ones down in the lower bass clef, where capital letters and no numbers are correct in the Heimholtz system.

I really grappled with how to answer these questions, especially since the teacher guides themselves are inconsistent in the way they show the answers. Also, IT DOES NOT SAY ANYWHERE ON THE SYLLABUS that the answers for pitch recognition must be presented this way. I shall probably request a remark on this!!!

The other mark I lost was in the writing of a C sharp minor triad. It is possible I lost concentration and wrote it in root position instead of first inversion. Oh well! However, I’m pretty sure this should be classified as a defective question, as C sharp minor is not on the Grade 2 syllabus.

(continued next page)

Fourth Grade Aural (3 marks lost):

Apparently I did not describe the form well enough in question 6...looking at the paper I’m not exactly sure what the correct answer would have been. I used letters A and B and I doubt I would have got it so wrong as to get zero out of 2! I’ll have to look into this. It certainly was not something that was drilled much on the aural CDs. This is clearly one of those problems  to do with unfamiliar nomenclature and it is not well-enough addressed in the workbooks.

I also lost a mark for incorrect naming of texture (‘canonic’ or ‘non-canonic’). Not sure what happened here... but it was 5:15 in the afternoon at that stage and I’d been doing exams since 8:45am, so maybe I was just a little tired! However, it was obviously quite a subtle example and I would just love to know what percentage of students got this question wrong.

Fourth Grade Written (1.5 mark lost)

D’oh... I would have received full marks on this paper!!! Once again I lost marks due to incorrect naming of notes. I made a conscious decision NOT to use the Heimholtz system and neither the exam paper nor the syllabus said I must. Needs reviewing, I think.