[ujnubub]

His biog says he skipped high school and went straight to grad school - that also wouldn't be possible here. He would need the correct number on his "key stage 3 year 11" exams to be entered into the computer before he could be allowed to do key stage 12 exams.

Strange how we supposedly won the cold war but the losers system seems to have been adopted.

We have had to stop accepting child geniuses into our maths dept because anybody that works with under 18s (even escorting them on a campus tour for an open day) now needs extensive police checks - 'to protect the children'.

[jfarmer]

Searching Google, I assume you're Australian? I don't know what "stage 12 exams" are.

In the US it's quite possible for a child gifted in mathematics to skip all sorts of things. My third year of college I taught 11th graders the subject I had just covered the previous quarter, Algebraic Topology, and also the theory of computation.

The 9th and 10th graders in the program were learning linear algebra and Scheme (the programming language).

It's weird to be in a room full of people who are in high school and are approximately 100x better at the subject you're studying.

[ujnubub]

UK - I was making an ironic point that the name of the tests seem to change and get more 'bureaucratic speak' every year.

Under a soviet centralised government system there was apparently more freedom to teach to the student's abilities than in the free world - where everything must match upto the central government stanardized testing quango.