Auckland Grammar Fourth Year

The Grammar System

In those days the move from Fifth Form (Year 11) to Sixth Form (Year 12) in the upper stream at AGS was almost unique to the school: boys from 5A who passed School Certificate with the best marks, were moved into 6A, along with fifth-year students who had already spent one year in that class.

Form 6A was thus half Year 12 pupils and half Year 13.

Third from left in middle row; Form master is Teddy Driver

As you can imagine, this was a big jump; it paid off because most of these first-year 6A pupils passed the Scholarship Examinations with Credit, and a few occasionally gained scholarships.

In those days, the scholarships system allowed for thirty scholarships over the whole country: the first ten were called University Junior Scholarships, and the next twenty were called University National Scholarships. After that, the next large chunk of successful students gained Credit passes (which carried benefits like accommodation allowances, exemption from some University course rules, priority for selection for prestige courses like medicine and dentistry, etc).

The exam results were based on a total of 2400 marks: the student had to sit in enough subjects to gain 2400 possible marks. English, Maths, and each language counted for 600 marks, and involved 2 papers; every other subject counted for 400 and involved one paper.

Those who gained scholarships from our school had their names in gold on the Honours Board at the front of the Assembly Hall; every assembly we looked at the Board and read the names of the previously successful people. We all knew that in the best year Auckland Grammar had gained 17 out of the 30 scholarships nation-wide.

You could say that the way the curriculum was arranged at the school was geared to producing as many scholarship winners as possible. Most years four or five was the number, especially as more and more high schools were being built after the war.

It is worth remembering that at that stage the population of the Auckland Region was around 250,000. Life in the city was a bit different in those days!

My 2400 mark exam course was made up of English (600: two papers), Latin (600: two papers), French (600: 2 papers), History (400: 1 paper) and Zoology (400: 1 paper). You will have spotted the anomaly: this comes to a total of 2600, so the arrangement was that one's lowest mark was scaled proportionately to total 2400.

Having got our heads around this over the previous year or so, we arrived at school the first day knowing we had challenges to meet.