OK, so I was feeling a little short-tempered when I made my initial posting, but the idea did not seem to have any redeeming features,as well as being impractical, and to no particular end. Setting up a straw man for a schoolboy debate.

There is a network of classically trained music teachers, all plying their trade publicly and privately, passing on their hard-earned knowledge and ability to later generations. A body of knowledge that has developed overr several hundred years. It's fairly easy to see that if you're going to learn the violin, there has been enough accumulated knowledge to have a fairly consistent way of learning. You learn the basics, easy pieces, and move on to harder pieces. And you practice a lot. "Standardized" tests help teachers to make sure they're on the right track, and if a kid moves from one school to another, his new teacher knows where to put him.

Now, a violinist needs to be able to play scales and arpeggios, and needs to be able to sightread fluently. It is my experience that some "good" folk performers can read music fluently, some can't read it at all. Not just singers, some of the leading Cape Breton fiddlers for exxample, as well as their piano accompanists. They learned by ear. We don't know if many of the long-gone traditional singers we revere could read music or not. Joseph Taylor probably could - he sang in a church choir. Many of the literate ones might well have also been literate in tonic sol-fa, good enough for Sam Henry in his newspaper column (the abc notation of yesteryear?). So should reading music be an exam requirement? Should NOT reading music be a requirement? Or is it irrelevant?

What is relevant? Should you lose points for not knowing C. Sharp's collected version of 'The Seeds of Love'? (even if you just want to be a traditional fiddler). Or not being able to identify William Kimber when you are played the recording of 'English Country Gardens' when you just want to sing ballads? Should you be required to know Child numbers (or Laws numbers, or Roud numbers)?

How about performance? Would unaccompanied songs be part of a lower grade test than self-accompanied songs? (Or the other way around?) Would guitarists need to be able to use a barre chord? Should concertinists be judged on whether they're playing 2-note chords or 3-note chords?

How many more examples do we need? There just isn't a unified body of knowledge that you would test on.

It has been pointed out that even if these obstacles were overcome, we still have the problem of resources. And interest, I would think. How many people might sign up for nightschool classes in the syllabus? Or are we addressing just kids? Should this be a unit of elementary music education? A bit different than singing from Sharp's book to the music teacher's piano!

And exams as encouragement to learn. I do like Guest Russ's take on that.

My own interest in folk music started in secondary school, when some friends went and started a folk club. I decided to learn to play guitar. My progress, such as it has been, has been fairly random, learning different instruments as I saw the need, or rather use, for them. Directions I have taken have been influenced by people I have met. Looking back, I haven't always made the right choices. Perhaps I needed the guidance of a graded system of folk music tests. Hey, if I'd lived in London I could have joined the Critics Group. But I've learned what I know on my instruments not by taking the classical approach of learning its capabilities from the ground up, but by practicing what I need to play a particular tune or song. So my instrumental work has lots of holes. Different again from the holes you'll find in any "folksinger's" arsenal. Would these tests have made sure these holes were filled, and made me a better musician.

If Newcastle can come up with a syllabus that people want to pay money for, more power to them, and it might give a few retired folkies a supplement to their pension. I don't know what the students get out of it other than the skills anyone gets taking a degree course in general arts. And I'm sure the ones who do go include many talented and motivated enough to succeed even without the university. I doubt it'll make it easier to get a folk club gig. Maybe the university letterhead will actually tease a reply out of a club organizer, even if it's a "no." But a nationwide system of graded tests on the general topic of folk music? The mind boggles.

My two denarii.