Want to work out your grading? There are two ways:

• If you want a quick answer, use our Interactive Self-Grader (your browser must be Java-enabled)
• If you want to give it more thought, then print out our standard Self-Grading form, and work through it off-line and at your leisure

Before you start:

Remember that self-grading is not a hard and fast science, and everyone's interpretation of the questionnaire will be personal to some extent.
You may like to consider the following explanations, contibuted by Rod Tuson. They might help lessen some of the uncertainties for you.

• How daily is 'daily practice'?
  'Daily' means most days, that is in a typical month where you are not travelling overseas, camping, or otherwise unusually unable to practice, you would practice at least an average of four days a week, each session being 30 minutes or more.
  The practice subject should be technical items such as bowing, scales, technically challenging parts of chamber music. Just playing through a work for pleasure doesn't count.
  Playing as a regular group should not be counted as this is addressed in question 2.

• How often is 'often'? (as in playing in groups)
  A full morning, afternoon or evening session with a chamber group can be defined as 'one'. So if a full day plus evening session is organised once each week with your group, it can be counted as three groups. The aberrant period of Christmas, when it can be difficult to get together, can be ignored in the calculation. If a regular group comprises only two members, the gatherings should be halved.

• How lost is 'lost'?
  This assumes you are playing in a group of three to five players, all of whom are as - or slightly more - experienced than yourself. You are sight-reading a work you have not played or heard (or only once at least several months ago). The work is one that, within a week or two of normal practice, you would be 'comfortable' with.
  'Lost' means missing notes or playing in the wrong place for at least 2 bars in Allegretto or faster, or 1 bar when slower than Allegretto. That is, missing a few semiquavers in a difficult run or leaving out some of the piano's left-hand notes does not constitute being 'lost'.
  Note that if you find your way back within the bar or two defined above you haven't been 'lost'. But you can't have your cake and eat it too: if you recovered quickly as above and haven't counted it as 'lost', you can't then count this as 'finding your way back' in question 3.

• Finding your way back
  You have found your way back if, without stopping, you rejoin the group within a phrase or by the next GP or conspicuous Sforzando, whichever is the shorter period. So if the group stops, or continues to play without you beyond a phrase, you haven't found your way back.

• What's 'comfortable'?
  Comfort is defined in the context of a well-matched group playing through a work for their own pleasure, not in public performance, and not necessarily with public performance in mind.
  You may have played the work many times before or can sight-read it comfortably, but the question assumes there is no forewarning, so you have no opportunity to specially practice it beforehand.
  It means that you can play the work in whole without getting lost and that wrong notes and timing errors are sufficiently few that stopping would be a matter of choice rather than necessity. The tempi need not be professional speed but at least, say, 70%, so as to have the right feel to the music.
  Most (at least 70%) of the dynamics and phrasing marks should be observed. For strings, bowing directions need not be observed provided style and expression marks are largely (70%) correct.

Now: on with your self-grading!