Yes, of course. I was imagining the CS as it might be in modern times.

We did a similar thing in French called a Certificate of Extended Studies, which was between GCSE and AS-level. The top stream would sit their French GCSE a year early and then spent fifth-form taking the CES, but I've never met anybody else who ever sat one. All I remember about it now was having to read Hervé Bazin’s Vipère au Poing, which was mightily depressing, and filling the book with such copious notes in 2B lead pencil that by the end of the year I couldn't open it without getting black fingers.

Other than Stacie, there don't seem to be a lot of very academic girls at the CS ... despite the fact that so many of them end up at Oxford! Various people are described as clever and or hard-working, but there are very few who seem to be really academic. The clever kid rarely gets to be the hero/heroine in books, but you'd expect there to be a few more of them around even if only as minor characters.

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

I think it's hard at that age, though, to define and identify true academics. So much of secondary schooling is rote learning - and even more of it was during the time the CS is set - that I don't think the characteristics that we'd associate with being 'really academic' shine through. In my experience it was only at college that those differences became clear.

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http://www.tryingtobegrownup.com

Mary Burnett was "that rare thing, a true student" - but although we're told that, we don't see an awful lot of it in practise.

Simone is certainly very studious and also very serious about her studies - but how much of that is down to needingto achieve academically, for financial reasons, and how much of it is genuine enthusiasm for her subject?

Juliet also seems (certainly by the time of Eustacia) to be a genuinely serious about learning and about university life, to the point of making herself ill.

I guess it depends what you mean by "academic" - I'd say a bright, studious person could be considered to be academic, and there are plenty of those at the CS. Doesn't just have to be those who are going to end up being an academic.

I was thinking in terms of the class clever-clogs/swot who comes top in every exam, that sort of thing .

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

Hmmm. I guess the thing is that EBD just isn't that interested in that side of things.

(It's almost like when I was in Sixth Form and it just wasn't perceived as cool to be seen to be a hard worker or do lots of revision, so everyone insisted that they hadn't done any work at all, oh no - except that they had, really. To be cool one had to achieve effortlessly - or apparently effortlessly. A bit like EBD's girls who go to Oxford without swotting at all.)

There is that girl in the later books (mental block on name) who is used to topping the form lists every week and gets very put out when a new girl arrives and steals her thunder. And then there is ML's form in Three Go, where they all suddenly start working really hard and Josette complains that they will get a remove apart from her becuase no matter how well she does, she is too young...?

Really, the school swots have to be Len and Con. No matter how much EBD underplays it, they are bright enough to hold their own in forms with girls years older than them from the age of about 10 onwards. That can't all be down to their greater knowledge of French and German.

We had the opposite problem - the cool thing when I was in Sixth Form was to appear to be working so hard that you were on the point of collapse. Symptoms of stress, some genuine and some almost certainly put on, were exaggerated to the nth degree, violent outbursts of all kinds were justified on the grounds that "I'm just under so much pressure right now!" and eventually the staff started to relax the rules for certain people who seemed to be "struggling". After that, anyone who knew how to do a good stage faint and cared to make use of the knowledge was home and dry... A good CS girl, of course, would never get involved in any such histrionics.

That's Janet Henderson, upset about Adrienne Desmoines - and actually, I think both of them DO exemplify the studious types, although the only emphasis EBD really places on it is to show up Janet's jealousy.

I'm trying to remember when the form lists start. People get weirdly obsessed with them - there's a conversation at the beginning of Barbara in which some of the older girls discuss where Len Maynard was on her form list the previous term, which sounds as if they've all memorised every list of every form! Do they start in Tyrol or is it not until Armishire?

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We really must stop eating like this ...

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.

The form list thing is closely linked to the remove madness as well. Those at the top of the list - maybe even the top five - get their removes at highly unusual times of the academic year. So if you head the list, or come within the top three or four, get removed at the end of the Christmas term, for example.

There seems to be no rhyme nor reason for the decisions made, sometimes. Apart from story-lines and plots, I mean!

Are form lists mentioned when Cornelia is left a Middle and her friends become Seniors? That's the only time I can really remember "removes" getting a mention in the Tyrol.

Placings do become almost an obsession in later books - and what really confuses me is that every single piece of form work seems to contribute to your form placing!

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Maybe EBD felt that plot and character development were more important than slavishly following a very set-in-stone form structure?

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"And I'm sure there was blood in the gutter from somebody's head, or else it was the sunset in a puddle."

So This is School! - The Sexiest Mistresses at the Chalet School

Yeah, but with a little care, she could've worked within a consistent form framework while still having plot and character development...

I don't deny. I just get the impression that kind of thing wasn't mahoosively important to her.

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"And I'm sure there was blood in the gutter from somebody's head, or else it was the sunset in a puddle."

So This is School! - The Sexiest Mistresses at the Chalet School

Did her school have regular class lists for a year or did it have a flexible system as we see in the Chalet school?

I can see where it would work to allow more academic girls not to be held back but it must have been a nightmare for the teachers especially coming up to exam time as all the girls would have been taught different stuff at different times. How did they ever ensure that they all came out at the end with the same knowledge or did they just feel the process of learning how to learn was as important as the actual content?

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‘He has only half learnt the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishments of skipping and of skimming.’
Arthur Balfour,“The pleasures of reading” (1905)

Possibly it worked more on the structure that we have here at university; in one term we will do one set of work (and usually get examined on it, though that's module dependent and doesn't always happen), then in the next term we do a different topic under the same broad umbrella - so, for a simple example, in Torts we spent one term doing Negligence and another doing some of the other torts, Trespass, Occupiers' Liability &c. That way you have a definite break between topics and in, say, an exam, students who'd been moved at term one (if you only did an exam at the end of that year in the topic, rather than at the end of the term) could answer the question/s on that term's topic/s and others could do the first term's topic/s. I don't see any reason that it shouldn't work, and yes, I do see several benefits, including the one ammonite mentions

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"His distinguished air, his handsome dark face, his composed attitude - for he stood perfectly still with one hand at his side - gave singular effect to the circumstance of his being without a hat." - 'Tales of Angria'