Not to derail, but could someone help out a USAian here?
What levels of education are being discussed here?
In the UK you must attend school until age 16. At that age you take GCSEs - General Certificates in Secondary Education. These are in a number of subjects some of which are compulsory. If you're smart you'd do about 8 to 10 of these. Not so smart, maybe 3 or 4. I think they are graded A through F and U (ungraded). (When I was at school, these exams were differentiated in to 'O (ordinary) levels' and CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education). Roughly speaking O levels are more academic and CSEs were more practical.)
you may choose to leave school at that age.
If you go on to 'sixth form', you'd do A (advanced) levels and leave at 18. Again, if you're smart you'd do 3 or 4 of these. No subjects are compulsory.
Then, you may choose to go to university and study a bachelors (BA, BSc, BEng ...) over 3 years or a Masters (MA, MSc, Meng) over 4. Or you could do a Masters separately after a bachelors. So that'd be ages 18-21 or 22
Alternatively after a Bachelors, you could study for a PhD over (at least) 3 years. So that'd finish around age 25.
There are variations on this, and it's become complicated by polytechnics (traditionally more trade-ful courses) becoming universities. Also Scottish education does a differently named exam at age 14 (scottish highers, IIRC).
Another alternative to A level is 'HND' Higher National Diploma. I'm not sure what purpose they serve now. It used to be you'd take these if you were intending either to work afterwards or attend technical college. Not university. My understanding is they're somewhere around 1st year undergraduate level. Also, if someone bails out of university before graduating, or fails finals really badly (but somehow managed not to get thrown out earlier) but has sufficient credit points from earlier years, they may be awarded a Diploma, hence my association of 'have Diploma' with 'failed degree'.
An (undifferentiated) graduate refers to someone who has (at least) bachelor's level qualification. We don't have the USian 'high school graduation' ceremony. The usual route to graduating university is GCSE, A levels, Bachelors. The usual route to becoming an academic is adding a PhD onto the end of that.
After that, you can get an Associates Degree, which is usually a 2-year program from a community college, junior college, or business college. Or go to a college or university and get a Bachelors Degree, which is usually a 4-year program. This is usually what is meant by “going to college” and is for ages 19-22. Courses are usually coded 100, 200, 300, and 400 by level of complexity. So 101 is code for the most basic course in a field and is used as slang in casual conversation to describe something very simple (“cooking toast is like Culinary 101”).
Same here. The requirements for award of a bachelors are something like 'at least 180 credit points at level 3 or higher'.
After a Bachelors Degree, you can go to graduate school and get a Master Degree (2-3 years) and after that get PhD (another 2-3 years).
As I mentioned above, there's no requirement to have a Masters to study for a PhD. But generally a PhD will take 3 + years full time.
The way I read it, A-Level is like passing high school physics, three A-Levels would be like passing a college prep test to be able to skip a low level 100 college physics course, and HND would be like basic sophomore college level physics.
Yes, I think that's right. My impression is that A-levels are more advanced than US high school, but not completely at 1st year university level. HNDs are at 1st year level. Note that doesn't mean having an HND will unconditionally get you into the 2nd year of a degree course. You'd have to negotiate that with the institution being applied for.
So where do A-Levels, HND, “three relevant A-Levels”, and such fit in to the USA system?
Hopefully the above is clear. To be accepted onto a university course, the minimum requirement is 2 A-levels at grade E (pretty damn easy.). However, if you're going for a Physics course at a decent university, they'd want to see one of your A levels being physics, and they'd probably want you to have 2A's and a B or something like that. There are equivalency conversions between A-levels and other awards, but they confuse university admissions, and they don't like them (I'm talking Russell[*] group, because that's what I know).
One of the difficulties with university admission, is one applies before you know your A level results, and thus the offers are all conditional based on predicted outcome. This leads to a noticeable skewing towards private schools who always predict high, rather than state schools who prefer to predict low. There is a drive to alleviate this in various ways.
Also: Is “cojent” a valid spelling of “cogent” in Britain or Australia?
No.
[*] as you might expect, there's a hierarchy of universities (by 'academicness'). From the top they go
1) Oxbridge (Oxford, Cambridge)
2) Russell Group 'older, but not that old' ~pre 1950
http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/
3) Red-brick 'newer, but not as new as ...' ~post 1950
4) Ex-polytechnics
5) Oxford Brookes 'university'
