School and education

After high school, students can go on to study at university or college. The test that is used to determine if they are ready for higher education is called SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test).

The academic year at American universities is usually divided into two terms. The school year typically starts in August or September and ends in May or June. During their first two years at university, students take classes in a lot of different subjects: literature, science, social sciences, history, art, etc. Then they choose their major – their specific field of study. This is an important difference between the USA and Britain or the Czech Republic where students specialize in one or two subjects right from the start of their studies.

Students in the USA get grades in the form of letters, not numbers. The grading scale is A (excellent), B (very good), C (improvement needed), D (close to fail), E / F (fail).

SCHOOL IN CZECH REPUBLIC

Children in the Czech Republic usually begin their education when they are three years old. They start going to kindergarten. In kindergarten, the children sing, play with toys, paint, draw, run, jump and do other activities. They learn how to communicate with other people and they get ready for real school. Sometimes, they can start learning English.

When they are six or seven years old, children start going to elementary school. Elementary schools in the Czech Republic have two parts. In the first part, the students learn how to read, count and write. They have only one teacher who teaches them everything. They also learn a little about nature, about the Czech Republic and about the world. They study the Czech language and the English language. They get grades from 1 to 5. One is the best grade and five is the worst grade. The students also usually start going to the school canteen. The food there is cheap but sometimes, for example in the town of Nové Strašecí, it is not very tasty (or at least it wasn’t very tasty about twenty years ago).

At the age of eleven or twelve, the students start the second part of elementary school. They have different teachers for different subjects. They study mathematics, Czech, English, one other language (usually German), geography, history, chemistry, civics, P. E., biology, music, and art. Sometimes, they also study cooking and working with wood.

When they are fifteen years old, Czech students usually finish elementary school. Now they have to decide if they want to continue studying or not. Most of them want to continue their studies and they try to choose the right high school. It takes four years to finish high school in the Czech Republic. At the end of high school, students have to pass exams in four subjects. This is called the maturita.

After passing the maturita exam, Czech students get their high school diploma and they can go on to study at university. University studies usually take three years and the successful students receive a bachelor’s degree (Bc.). The letters Bc. are used by the students who studied humanities as well as by the students who studied sciences. Many students continue their university studies for two more years and earn their master’s degree (Mgr.). Students of technical, agricultural and economic universities get a special master’s degree called an engineer’s degree (Ing.). Some students continue studying even longer and they get a doctor’s degree (PhD), which is the highest university degree that you can get.