ABRSM Practical exams Vs. Performance
From 2020, piano students interested in sitting for an ABRSM examination can choose between in-person or online, when before last year didn’t exist.
All piano teachers are already aware of this news. Still, many learners don’t know its existence, and it is a handy thing to know the difference between the practical and the performance exams.
We have another type of examination because during 2020, the pandemic made all exams be suspended for a while and the board of examinations decided to introduce a new type of exam: the performance exam.
The main difference is that the performance exam is a set of four pieces that the student has to present as a concert, hence the word “performance exam”. The aim is to offer the closest experience to a concert than a common exam situation; this means that all technical work such as scales and arpeggios are no more. Also, aural exam and sight-reading have been removed, leaving the pieces to be the only device to exam the student.
The last remark leads us to the next part: the number of pieces. A fourth was added to enable the student to deploy more contrast among the pieces played in the exam. The idea behind this is to create more stylistic choices to judge the student’s performance. A handy tip for this is to select four pieces from the four different styles and periods, for example, one piece from the Baroque period, another from the Classical period, then the Romantic and finally a piece selected from the 20th century; the latter consists in a huge array of styles that can be from Debussy, Bartok, Gershwin, Prokofiev, or any composer that can be in the list of the ABRSM approved and selected pieces for the specific grade that the student is sitting.
This type of exam proved to work and moreover proved that ABRSM came up with an excellent idea to keep the students interested in piano playing.
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