# How Do Children Who Never Take Graded Exams Play Five Years Later: Three Teachers Say the Same Thing

The original Chinese article reports the following conversations with three piano teachers.

"Without graded exams, what keeps children going with piano lessons?" We have heard this question so often that we asked three piano teachers, each with more than ten years of teaching experience. We asked just one question: How do the students you have taught who never take graded exams play five years later?

## The First Teacher: A Higher Proportion Are Still Playing

Fewer than 20% of her students had never taken graded exams. Yet five years later, the proportion still playing within that group was higher than among the roughly 80% who took exams. Her explanation was that half of the children who took exams stopped in the year they earned a certificate for a particular grade, because they had reached their goal. Children who did not take exams had no such moment of "I've made it," leaving them with one fewer reason to stop.

## The Second Teacher: Fewer Pieces, but Every One Is Complete

He said that after five years, students who did not take exams could play fewer pieces—perhaps only a dozen or so—while students who took exams might have "studied" thirty or forty. The difference lay between "can play" and "have studied": children who did not take exams practiced every piece through from beginning to end. For children who took exams, half the pieces involved working closely on a few passages and then setting the piece aside after the exam. Ask each child to play the piece they know best five years later, and the child who did not take exams would usually give the more complete performance.

## The Third Teacher: Parents Started Asking Different Questions

She spoke about the parents. Families whose children took exams asked her, "What grade are they at?" and "Can they take the next grade?" Families whose children did not take exams initially asked, "Then how do we know how far they've progressed?" After six months, they stopped asking that and switched to "Can they play this piece all the way through yet?" and "What piece will they learn next?" Once the questions changed, what the children practiced changed too.

![Three different teachers' student record books spread open on a table](https://static.lianmuse.com/image/blog/3aa45a7f9b175641edfeb5fd27840bb0.jpg)

Taken together, the three answers point to the same thing: what children who do not take exams lack is not a goal, but a replacement for the exam system. Graded exams set goals, choose pieces, and provide a timetable for families. Take them away, and the family has to set its own.

![A child choosing the next piece they want to play alone in front of a bookshelf](https://static.lianmuse.com/image/blog/94f7fc39c68dbb78760eacff65be3aad.jpg)

The alternatives the three teachers suggested were much the same: play a piece from beginning to end, count finishing it as a milestone, and then move on to the next one. The original article describes Wonder Piano's China-market Challenge Mode at the time of publication: playing a whole piece produces a completion score. Among the families we have seen whose children do not take exams, some use that number as their own "grade": moving from 50% to 90% counts as passing a piece.

Not taking graded exams has never been the problem; having no replacement is. The children still playing five years later all have a family-defined moment of "I've made it."

If your child does not take graded exams, how does your family decide "how far they've progressed"?

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Wonder Piano provides AI-assisted practice support for piano practice at home. Here, we write about practice methods and the difficulties families encounter when putting those methods into use.

[Original Chinese article on WeChat](http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=Mzk2NDI0NTYzOQ==&mid=2247488469&idx=1&sn=23b5cb7923cb86e3d5a30bfa73748068&chksm=c477323df300bb2be5b369e540180f0f87abcdde971eeceaad2fd204298d1cb3f0162a4247bb#rd)