Is this even possible? I have Grade 4 piano exam this week and it's all going horribly wrong! I have read the advice posted below on another thread but I'm still not sure that eveything's going to work out. I haven't had a lesson this week due to illness - will not be able to play for two days before the exam due to being away for work and seem to be unable to play anything properly. This is my first exam in twenty-odd years and to make it worse I am my piano teacher's first ever pupil to do an ABRSM exam - he's relying on me to pass! I now wish I had asked for a Performance Assessment instead of an exam but I think it's a bit late.

Hellllp - remind me why I decided that it was a good idea to try this!

(P.S, Last night I dreamt that there was no piano available for the exam so I had to do it on a mini keyboard without pedals )

Oh dear
Don't know what to suggest at all, except speak to your teacher as soon as possible!

I think we've all been through a crisis before exams, but it really does usually come good on the day.
I don't know if you can get a postponement or not, but perhaps someone else here can tell you.

If your teacher thinks you're ready for the exam, I wouldn't worry about missing two days practice. Hope it goes well, whatever you decide. Do let us know!


A

Hi Tortellini,

Don't worry! Sometimes it can be really good not to play just before an exam. I have actually had this experience on two occasions (despite being an examophobe!) Just try to de-stress if you can - after all, your teacher wouldn't have entered you if he thought you weren't ready. Can you get to the exam centre a little early and run through your pieces / warm up etc? Or if not, practise before you go to the centre? I don't think you should feel this much pressure because you think your teacher is relying on you to pass. Of course he wants you to, but would only be disappointed if you didn't pass because you yourself would be disappointed. Just do the best you are able to in the circumstances - no-one can ask more of you than that.

Good luck!

As you have been entered why not just have a go at the exam and do your best to enjoy it? If it goes well you will be delighted and if it doesn't it will not matter one little bit. You won't get a six month ban from playing or anything and you will have had a chance to meet an examiner and will get some useful and positive comments on your playing. Have a bash. Passing really isn't too important. It is the effort than you have put in on the journey to the exam that is. Go for it. You have little to lose and lots to gain.

If you go ahead and take the exam and are unfortunate enough not to pass at least you'll have a breakdown of the areas that still need work which will give you an advantage when you retake it.

I agree with petrat. Perhaps because you haven't had an exam in 20 years, some of what you are feeling is because of facing the unknown. Practical Exams came be mysterious things! Go for it. Do your best. Whatever the outcome, actually doing the exam will be useful for future study.

All the best!

Thank you for all your advice! I did the exam It wasn't the all-out disaster I feared but it wasn't great either - I made a mistake in ALL my pieces but all of them were "nervous" mistakes and I more or less recovered. Scales went ok although I did have a mental blank on F minor - and actually told the examiner that I didn't think it was on the syllabus He assured me it was and then it came back to me! I felt a little silly as I was the eldest in the waiting room by at least 25 years but, all in all, it was a positive experience (even if I don't pass) as everyone was so nice.

BTW I was really nervous about having to do the exam after two days of not playing because I was at a conference for work. When I got to the conference it was being held next to a piano shop! The lovely owner let me play one of the grands during the conference coffee breaks!!!

Well, if you decide to go on to grade 5, you don't have to worry about remembering which scales you have to know as you have to do all of them. ;-)
For flute, I have to do all the majors and minors plus selected dims & doms (which are basically just fancy arpeggios) and I find it less work to learn the whole lot rather than try to keep track of which ones I'm supposed to know! (If I ever get to grade 8 I'll have to know them then anyway, so I may as well learn them now and get it over with.)
On organ, I don't bother remembering which manual scales I'm supposed to know as they're a subset of the piano ones. If I have to practice them, I'd rather play them on my favourite instrument than on my least favourite, so I just do the whole lot on organ. :-) (Think of it as a "Get Out Of Piano Practice Free" card!.)
Overall I think learning the scales themselves is less hassle than learning which scales are on the syllabus.

Don't worry about a few mistakes in your pieces. I made mistakes (some of them quite big ones) in all my pieces in all my exams this term, especially piano. I think I've just scraped through on piano and done OK on the others.
Last term I stuffed up half the scales in my organ exam. Stopped dead halfway down the first one and played it again (without stopping that time, but my fingers slipped again and my hands got out of sync). Got out of sync again in the second one (though without a re-start). Played all the right notes in the third one, but with seriously unorthodox fingering (Bb major and I put a thumb on a black note at one point). Then got the rest (2 minors and a chromatic) right, but a little shakey. (I had NOT been expecting to stuff up F and D majors (they were always fine in practice and lessons), so I was really badly rattled by that.)
Got 17 for scales!

I always come out of an exam knowing full well where every mistake was and completely unable to remember all the bits that went quite well. If I play a piece with really convincing style, crisp ornamentation, good dynamic contrasts, careful articulation, etc, I'll come out of the exam and say "I played a wrong note in the penultimate bar".
Sure, mistakes will lose you a mark or few, but the examiner is listening to the overall performance and will pick up on a load of stuff that you do that's good that you don't even notice because you're so used to doing it. In the organ exam which started with easy scales unravelling completely, I got more and more rattled as it went on, and made more and more mistakes. One fairly noticeable slip in my first piece (27), several in the last couple of lines of my second piece (27) and completely messed up an entire section of my third piece (29 - I messed up in the atonal bit and kept going regardless and I don't think he even realised).
So you've probably done a lot better than you think.

My very first flute exam, I came out of the exam and told my teacher exactly what mistakes I'd made through the entire exam. I was able to count off every place I could possibly have dropped some marks. Got the results a few weeks later and I had dropped exactly 1 mark per mistake.

This term the thing I'm most interested to see the result for is organ scales, because it's the first time ever I've had a section where I don't think I got anything wrong. (I've had full marks in aural sometimes, but I'm never 100% sure if I've got the "how many beats in a bar?" bit right, so I tend to assume it was wrong because it's always wrong in lessons, so I'll come out of exams and say stuff like "I made a mistake in test A and I have no idea if I got the 'beats in a bar' right", or "aural was fine apart from the 'beats in a bar' bit".) I've never ever come out of an exam with a section I couldn't pinpoint a mistake in (or, for aural, a possible mistake) before now, and it /really/ threw me, because I'm always so aware of "what went wrong"!
Scales were accurate, even and I didn't put thumbs on black notes (even in Bb major, which did come up!) - I guess he could dock marks for speed (I took them a little slower than I could've done) or fingering (nothing glaring, but there's usually a few 'creative' bits), so I'm curious to see what I get.

Examiners are looking for "what went right". And even in a piece with several slips, chances are that a lot more went right than went wrong.




Brilliant! :-)
Quite apart from being able to practice, that would've been useful experience of playing different pianos (one of the things that worries me about piano exams is having to play an unfamiliar piano, especially as I very rarely play any apart from mine and my teacher's and occasionally the one in the songroom at the church where I sing).

T.

I'm inclined to agree - the pain for me would be remembering which are one octave, which a twelfth, which one octave and down to the dominant, which two octave, and so on.
When practicisng, I tend to play the scale to the 'full extent' - so an F major on the treble recorder is two octave. But you don't play it to that extent in an exam until grade 5 (which I am not) - it's one octave at G1 and a twelfth at G2-4.

I don't tend to play the scales that don't appear until G6 or up yet (hey, there's a project for me!) - but by that point most of them are as 'big' as they can be on the recorder, which is one less thing to remember (just as well, given that there are a couple of hundred things they can ask you to do for G8 )

I have that problem with recorder too. Didn't learn any pre-grade 5 scales, but even at 5 there are some that aren't obvious. F was the worst as it could've been either a twelfth or an octave and down to the dominant (I was doing descant) and I kept forgetting which it was meant to be. And for some unfathomable reason, C major was 2 octaves but C minor was a twelfth. Argh!

I also have a bit of a problem with number of octaves for piano. Scales are 3, but arpeggios are 2, and organ scales are 2. And of course I do about 10 times as much organ practice as I do piano practice, and my scales in particular are done mostly on organ.
In my piano exam I played one of the minor scales, then suddenly thought I'd done it the wrong distance, said to the examiner "Er, I just did that two octaves, didn't I?". He said I had and they were really supposed to be three. I quickly played it correctly and explained that they're 2 octaves on organ. So, it was clearly a case of me knowing the scale but getting mixed up about the syllabus requirements, so I hope I don't lose too many marks for that. (I'm going to lose plenty for the contrary motion minor as it is.)

T.

Glad it went well for you. Just the wait now!
I think if you feel it went OK, that's a really good sign.

I wouldn't worry about being the oldest in the waiting room. That's always going to happen as an adult learner. I remember my early theory exams, sat in a school hall at what seemed like little desks with about twenty or so 7 and 8 year olds around me - and me at 50+++. The supervisor started by asking everyone to make sure mobiles were turned off and it seemed like all twenty got their phones out of their bags and turned them off!

In my last exam, grade 5, I was sat much further back in the hall with the teenagers, and looking forward to the front row where the grade 1 pupils were sat, there was what can best be described as a 'biker type' - big bloke, hairy, leather jacket, sat amongst the children. Good for him I thought, and mentally wished him luck!

Let us know when you get your result Tortellini.


A

Me too, and that included the parents and teachers in there as well

I got a distinction Just! 130

Thank you so much to everyone for persuading me to go ahead - the advice I have got from this forum has been invaluable. I am truly shocked at the result (in fact, they told me over the phone last month but I didn't tell anyone until I got the certificate today as I thought there might have been a mistake!) I got 18 for the aural part too which was really down to reading on here that it's important to sound confident even if you aren't - it paid off!

Thanks again - you are all stars!

Congratulations!

I think we are much more critical of ourselves as adults and it is easy to convince yourself that you can't possibly pass in the run up to an exam. We focus on all the mistakes and forget about all the other good things that are going on and scoring us marks! Hope this great result encourages you to continue - onwards and upwards!

Sue

Congratulations