1. Use your full name. The quizzes are open to all classes in years 9, and 10. Entering your full name in the quiz response will help us greatly in identifying students who have and haven't completed the quiz and assign them the correct marks on their reports. First names aren't enough information when you consider there may be more than one student across multiple classes with the same first name.
2. Chord abbreviations. One of the main things we saw from the quiz responses were the different ways that you guys wrote down your chords. I know we didn't cover the ways we write chords in great detail so I'll give you guys some quick information on it here:
- If you are writing a major chord, you can write the letter of the chord simply as a capital letter. For example if you want to write "A Major" you can simply write "A" (without the quotation marks), "C Major" would be "C", "Bb Major" would be "Bb" etc... It’s normal to assume the chord is major when you write the chord as a single capital letter.
- If you are writing a minor chord, you can write the chord as a capital letter, with a lower case "m" next to it, for example "Cm", "Gm", "Dm", "Am", "Em"...
If you are writing a suspended chord you can write the chord name as a capital letter, with either "sus2" or "sus4" next to it. For example, "Csus2", "Gsus4", "Dsus2", "Asus4" etc...
- If you are writing a Major 7th chord, you can write the chord as a capital letter with "Maj7" next to it. For example CMaj7, GMaj7, DMaj7 etc...
- If you are writing a minor 7th chord, you can write the chord as a capital letter with "m7" next to it. For example Fm7, Bbm7, Ebm7 etc...
- If you are writing a dominant 7th chord, you can write the chord as a capital letter with "7" next to it. For example A7, E7, B7, F#7 etc...
- If you are writing a diminished 7th chord, you can write the chord as a capital letter with "dim7" next to it. For example Ddim7, Bbdim7, Edim7 etc...
Of course there are other ways of abbreviating chords, but the way I’ve listed above is the simplest way of abbreviating them without using shapes and other symbols.
3. The flat symbol is always a lower-case b written after the chord letter, even when it's written in a major chord in a capital letter. For example, "Bb", "Eb", "Ab" etc...
4. The sharp symbol “#” is always after the chord letter, for example, F#, C#, D#, A# etc…
5. Suspended chords are neither major nor minor. The term suspended means that the chord is 'suspended' somewhere around a major or a minor chord. Remember that the middle note (your 'third') is the note that determines whether the chord is major or minor. If we flatten that note down to a second then it becomes a suspended second chord, not a "major suspended chord" as a chord can't be both suspended and major at the same time.
6. All of the keyboard chords we gave you were chords in root position, there weren't any inverted chords or slash chords in the quiz.
7. Since we didn’t specify which key the sample chords were in, we ignored the sharps and flats (enharmonics) that we got in the answer responses. For example, anyone who wrote C# or Db for the same chord would have gotten the answer marked as correct.