As such, I wondered if the marking would be comparatively harsher as an attempt to prove they aren’t, and unfortunately, this did seem to be the case with some of my candidates, bearing in mind that teachers can now see how their students performed “on the day”. In that case, it was probably the difference between the merit I thought he deserved for how well he played his pieces, and the high pass he ended up with overall.Ĭriticism has been levelled at ABRSM over the difficulty of these exams compared to the traditional pathway, with many people - rightly or wrongly - assuming that the absence of supporting tests makes them the easy option somehow. This can be tough to remember if you’re relaxed in your own living room rather than on the ball in front of an examiner, to the point that one student completely forgot to do any of it despite plenty of rehearsal, and thus the performance as a whole was marked accordingly.
Abrsm accompanist how to#
You need to think about how you present yourself how to have your music sorted so you're not fumbling in between pieces preparing yourself mentally for each piece what to do at the end of a piece (hold that pose before you put the instrument down!) what to do with your instrument when you’re in between pieces being fully engaged with the performance and committed to the music throughout the whole programme, and so on. So even though you’re playing to your phone, if you want to score well here you should still peform as if you are doing so for an audience, and this means employing a bit of stage craft. On top of that, an extra set of 30 marks for the “performance as a whole”, similar to how the ARSM performance only diplomas are marked, is thrown in for good measure, bringing the total to 150 and making up a fifth of the entire possible mark.
It can be tricky to see the wood for the trees and be objective at that point, for both student and teacher.ĪBRSM use the same marking criteria for the Performance Grades as they do for “standard” Practical Grades, with the four pieces each marked out of 30 on Pitch, Time, Shape, Tone and Performance. The disadvantage of being allowed multiple attempts is that it’s very easy to get sucked into having “just one more go to get it perfect” - another had exactly this issue and ended up submitting eight versions of his video for me to choose the final version from.
A risky strategy, since you want to open your programme confidently, but for him, it paid off. To counteract this, one of my resourceful young students decided, by himself, to programme his least secure piece first, so that if he did make a total mess of it and have to start again, he wouldn’t have to re-do the entire programme. This of course is exactly how it would work in an in-person exam, so ABRSM have done absolutely the right thing here by insisting on a continuous edit. Theoretically, you could get all the way to the end of piece four, make some howling mistakes or bad performance decisions, and blow an otherwise great take of the other three.
However, since your submitted performance must be in one continuous take from beginning to end, what you can’t do is cherry pick the best versions of the pieces from each attempt and edit them together, so it doesn't necessarily offer much advantage over an in person exam since anything can go wrong at any time. You can do it as many times as you like and select the best one.