Quote from: "T Nagler"The only harder A levels are Music, Maths, Physicsnice, all the ones i did.You forget further maths though. thats is/was the hardest a-level.
The only harder A levels are Music, Maths, Physics
btw maths has apparently been made easyer this year
Climbing (or specifically bouldering on plastic) is obviously something you deem yourself reasonablly good at when compared to the rest of the population of students doing this subject as an A level. It is therefore safe to say that if a "practical test of preformance" based on this criteria was part of your curriculum you would expect do well. Is your argument not tainted by this desire to maximise your advantage?
Climbing as a sport is not condusive to the measurement that you can attribute to "mainstream" sports. You can easily compare the performance of 2 or more people running a distance (say 100m) because a 100m distance is a static known constant. Any enviromental variables such as wind etc. are small and can in most cases limited or taken into account in some way.
Even if you were to agree that the basis of your assessment should be a boulder problem as opposed to a sport route, a trad route or even a 4000m peak with technical ice, what constant do you use for a V9 F7c?
Should it be steep or slab? Limestone, granite, sandstone, grit or heaven forbid - slate? Should it have pockets or crimps, slopers or a crack? What kind of moves should it have - long and dynamic or short and bunched?
What about other factors like weather conditions, friction,
fall potential, highball factor etc. etc.
What you have touched on here is the grading debate. Grading is subjective. Way more subjective than "coiling a rope".
To assume that the ability to climbed an "established" V12+ guarentees that will flash every V6 you jump on is foolish.
Good comps work (there are many shit comps) because there are a range of problems of different styles that can divide the field somewhat fairly. That said doing well at comps does not convert to being a strong outdoor climber so unless the A level is for 'Competition Indoor Bouldering' your also outa luck
Also, I don't just climb on plastic. And I'm even better outdoors on some rock types than I am indoors.
Gymnastics? Diving? Even with sports like football, hockey, netball etc (all games in general) there is a subjective element to the assessment.
I think you have missed the point. The very honourable Dr Wong was explaining (I think) that there are too many variables. To spell that out for you :Times the number of :Types of Rockby Types of MovebyAngles of RockEquals to many elements to give everyone an equal opportunity.Have a think about the variables in gymnastics. Now apply that to climbing. See a difference?
Does this happen for the other sports? Lets hope its a better summer that this year then.
Opps! Theres another variable to add. That list is getting long :cry:
No Trevor that not what he did. It seems to me that he was explain how hard it is to have a wide range of testing in an establised part of competitive climbing. That is not what a-levels are about. Level playing field and all that.This is getting boring now
What about game sports (football, hockey, etc.)? You can achieve full marks as a goal keeper or as a striker (and every other position). And from what I gather it doesn't have to be on a full sized pitch (football pitches vary in size anyway). It also doesn't have to be on grass! I could be on tarmac, redgra (clay), astroturf etc.
Also, why would a climbing comp be logistically imposable? There are probably less A level PE students that rock climb than there are competitors in the bicc and the bbc. A lot of people would have to travel but this is normal in comps. Anyway, with the current syllabus I'll (and everybody who doesn't live near any rock) will have to travel.
Same as in gymnastics: a consensus is reached on how hard each move/skill is in order to determine the overall difficulty of the routine in order to give the starting value/score.
If synchoronised swimming is considered a sport (god knows how) then there is no reason why competition climbing can't be. (No offence to any synchonised swimmers out there - ie. Dylan – you do look cute in speedos though mate