Scottish Qualifications questions

I'm moving from Northern Ireland to Scotland, and I have absolutely no idea how the education system works. I know I could use google but if you could help me out, please do, the new terminology's way too confusing for me right now to make sense of anything.

I'm doing my last year of GCSEs this year: are the GCSEs equivalent to the National 5 in Scotland?
How many nationals, highers and advanced higher subjects do people normally do?
Do schools have entry requirements per subject for highers?
Do people normally go on to do advanced highers, or do most just leave after doing highers?
What's the difference between A levels and the Scottish system? Since the grade boundary for an A in the Scottish system is way lower (70%+), does this mean the Scottish qualifications are harder?
I want to do engineering at university in England, but some universities there want a further maths A level. Is there an equivalent of further maths in the Scottish system?

Reply 1

usernamexela

Original post by zzero

Bit late but if you still haven't found out:

I cant really speak to the comparative difficulty but National 5's and GCSE's are of a similar level.

Usually people do 6 national 5's, 5 Highers and from my experience most people do 2 advanced Highers if they do them at all.

Its hard to quantify the difficulty of each qualification but based on the (new) UCAS table: In A levels an A* is worth 56 points with an A worth 48 and a B worth 40. Whereas, an A at Advanced higher is worth 56 and a B is worth 48. So an A at Advanced higher is equal to an A* at A-level - in UCAS points - while a B at AH is equal to an A at A-level. However, from what I could find of average A level grade boundaries A*=<90% A=<80% B=<70% it seems that the boundaries are much higher. In AH an A=<70%. So yes you could say advanced Highers are harder when it comes to the value UCAS assigns them. However, most Scottish students - from my experience - only do 1-2 AH, rarely 3-4. The majority of students attain many Highers instead, which are valued far less by UCAS (A=33 B= 27 points). So really its impossible to say which is "harder", they focus on 3 A levels while Scottish pupils do many more, so perhaps less is expected of the Scottish pupils. One of the additional benefits is that banding is not shown on the Scottish certificate, a "band one" A is usually <80%, which is more comparable to the A level boundaries but Scottish unis don't ask for the banding so in that sense the Scottish system is easier.

A to your final question I can't say but I can tell you the highest level of mathematics you can study in Scotland is advanced higher, which is required for many - if not most - of the STEM subjects.

Hope this helps - but I may be mistaken so I'd suggest researching what I've said.