Katarina's Music Studio

Saturday, January 20, 2018 by Katarina Marcinger | Grade exams and exam boards

There are several fully accredited music exam boards in the UK. The two largest ones are Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) and Trinity College. There are also others, most notably Rockschool, exclusively focusing on music skills for the contemporary musician and London College of Music (LCM). They all carry the same amount of UCAS points for Grades 6,7 and 8 that can be used to boost the candidate's university or college application in the UK. 

ABRSM and Trinity College both offer "traditional" music grades focused mainly on classical music with some jazzy and more contemporary pieces thrown in. They also offer jazz and rock & pop grades. Jazz and contemporary grades tend to be often overlooked by many music teachers and schools who do not really consider them as highly as the "classical" grades. However, for many students they can be precisely the right path to take to become the musicians they always wanted to be. They require their exam pieces to be played to a backing track which tends to be quite popular with students. Also they have improvisation as part of their syllabus which attracts many kids to these types of exams. They can normally choose between sight reading or improvisation as a supporting test for their exams and from my experience most kids do chose improvisation. It is worth noting that Trinity College "classical" grades also offer improvisation, although a bit more "generic" than Rock and Pop type exams that focus on current music and teach students to improvise in pentatonic scales and read chord charts which is very relevant for anyone who is interested in playing current music or jazz. 

As for the two biggest traditional grades providers, ABRSM is much more rigid in their requirements than Trinity College who are proud to tailor their exams to each candidate's strength. There are upsides and downsides to both approaches that we will discuss in further articles on this subject. 

As a summary, we can say that there is enough choice for a British music student to study according to their needs and talents and follow an exam board that is most inspirational for them. As mentioned before, all these 4 exam boards are recognised equally by OFSTED and awarded the same amount of UCAS points for Grades 6,7, and 8. Each of them has their strengths and weaknesses and none of them is perfect. We will be examining each exam board in detail in subsequent posts. 

Tweet