Colorado Technical University

What are the classroom divisions in Japanese schools?

In a lot of the anime, I see school rooms labeled 1-A, 2-B, etc all the way to F. Is this equivalent to Wing 1, 2 etc in American schools? Recently I watched an anime series where the students of classroom F were not respected. Does this have some truth to it or is it an exaggeration? Are Japanese students separated into homerooms according to academic levels? Thanks!

Public Comments

1. The room labels are indeed correct yet the rest arent. Yes,It is an exaggeration,& No there not seperated into homerooms according to acadamic Levels. Hoped it helped. ^-^
2. Usually, I was told that they have their own HOMEROOM as a real room like 1-A (which means the A room of first grade). Students go to the certain room to get opening meeting with the HOMEROOM Teacher. The homeroom teacher also holds the ending meeting every school day. This is only in HS or under but never occurred in College or University . Except special class like experimentation or actual technique like music, painting and/or physical exercise, the HOMEROOM classmates are unchanged and staying in same room to take the individual teacher's class lesson in standard system. Some exception like American style may exist of course. The system that teachers visit the rooms to and fro instead of students is rather common in Japanese school. Allotted classmates may be rearranged on next school year or keep going same until graduation. It depends on each school. Talking about the room A to F or some alphabets, I think that some school may allot classmate into the room A to F in order with those students previous score degree. For instance if there are 240 students in one grade of the school, the allotment will be for the A room of 40 students which has No.1 to No.40, the B room has No.41 to No.80 ..... and the F room has No.201 to No.240 in total. Thus the class F seemed leftover scums in a sense possibly. It is not so popular but usually allotted at random though. Anime seemingly has quite often exaggerated unusual funny things too much.
3. The classes are divided like this: The first number means your year. Year 1, year 2, and year 3. So class 1 - A would means year 1, class A. The classes are just divided so that there aren't too many students in one class. It's like the homeroom. The class letter doesn't mean anything, and they aren't divided by skill level. You are divided into your homeroom by which type of course you decided to take. When you first enter Japanese high school, you can choice to take humanities course or science course. Humanities will focus more on English, Japanese, history, and arts (but you still have some math and science classes) and the science course will focus on math, science, and technology (but you still have English, Japanese, history, etc.). Since the class that you're in always stay together except for special classes like art or PE, you have to be grouped with people who are taking the same course as you. The skill level doesn't have anything to do with it though, so the anime was just an exaggeration. =)