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Originally Posted by David55
I think that these situations are caused by different school systems in the US and israel.
In israel, you earn "units" by doing tests in different subjects. This may be similar to your finals.
To finish highschool you have to earn a certain amount of units by passing several tests in different subjects (math, english, history, citizenship, hebrew, literature and a major subject). As you can see, one of the requirements for finishing hishschool is majoring in a subject. For some students, the subject they are majoring in is robotics (there are literally hundreds of subjects you can major in, from physics to chemistry to bible, languages and even hotel management). Anyway, for some robotics majors, FIRST is their final project, meaning they can't get a high school diploma without doing it and writing a project about it.
Most of the finals (like history, english, part of math, hebrew) are done in 10th and 11th grade, meaning that in 12th grade you really only do literature, math, citizenship and your major, which lets the school give you 6 weeks off of school to do your final project.
For you there is school and FIRST, for us FIRST is school.
I also think that school is taken in a whole different way by the American and Israeli youth. In israel, most finish with highschool, go to the army for 3 years and then do a trip around the world for about a year. Only after that, at the age of 23-24, only start to think about universities and do the Israeli equivalent of SAT's.
In the US, highschool is basically a big race for colleges. Grades are taken very siriously. people study for hours a day, do extra curicular activities, and with the rest of their time study for the SAT's, all so they get into an IV league university. Highschool in Israel is a lot more relaxed, grades are not taken as seriously and people have time to really enjoy the last years before army and adulthood. They always have a chance to improve their grades after the army.
(If anyone is interested, I can explain a bit more about the school system here. It is a quite interesting one, but really stupid and useless.)
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