"Year 7 grades do not count, so this is the year to enjoy yourself." That was accepted wisdom for a long time. But the scheme it rested on has changed, and a fair number of families are going through Year 7 without knowing it.

The free year and the free semester are not just different names

The two terms look similar, but the range they exclude is different.

The free year system set aside the whole of Year 7 for career exploration and participatory lessons, without exam pressure. Subject results from that period were not counted towards the high school entry record. So "Year 7 does not count" was true.

The free semester system narrows that to one semester. Grades are still not produced for the first semester of Year 7, but from the second semester subject grades are produced and count towards the high school entry record. It is a difference of one semester, but from the student's point of view the moment at which grades start going on the record has moved a year earlier.

How the weightings actually changed

The specific figures are set by each office of education. Taking the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education's guidance on school records for 2026 high school entry as an example, the structure was previously Year 8 40% plus Year 9 60%, and was adjusted to Year 7 10% plus Year 8 40% plus Year 9 50%.

Ten per cent looks small on its own. But the significance lies elsewhere than in the weighting itself. First, the second-semester Year 7 exams now go on the record for real. Second, with Year 9 falling from 60% to 50%, there is less room for a strategy of making everything up in the final year. The margin available for turning things round at the end has narrowed.

What the second semester of Year 7 actually means

The second semester of Year 7 is the stretch in which a student first experiences a formal written assessment system. What sets during this period is habit rather than score.

Three things in particular are decided here: how the student organises the exam syllabus for themselves, how they manage performance assessment deadlines, and the habit of going back over wrong answers. All three carry straight into Years 8 and 9, and the differences are amplified in high school when the number of subjects rises.

Conversely, we would not recommend fixating on the grades themselves at this stage. If the weighting is around 10%, the purpose of this semester is better set as adapting to the assessment system than as pushing the score up — which serves the following two years better.

What is a sensible use of the first semester?

The first semester of Year 7, in which grades are not produced, is still time allocated to career exploration and participatory lessons. Filling it entirely with pre-study runs against the purpose of the scheme, and does not directly help with adapting to the assessment that starts in the second semester either.

What is worth doing in this semester instead is building the habit of recording activities during lessons. Free-semester activities are not converted into grades, but they do appear in other sections of the school record. Practising setting down what was done and why is something that keeps being used after the move to high school. Managing the record after that move is taken up in High School.

In summary

"Year 7 does not count" has become "the first semester of Year 7 does not count, and the second semester does". And the weightings and timing differ by region. The first thing to do is not to book a consultation at an academy but to find the weighting table that applies to your child's year group in the high school entry plan published by your local office of education.