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Ode to Joylessness
Netflix‘s new mystery series A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is set in a sleepy English town stained by a teenaged girl’s murder. While everyone assumes that the beautiful Andie Bell (India Lillie Davis) was killed by her boyfriend Sal Singh (Rahul Patti), Pippa “Pip” Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myers) doesn’t buy it. Even though Sal admitted to the murder before dying by suicide, Pip recalls Sal as a sweet, kind boy. So what’s a good girl to do when she thinks justice hasn’t been served? Well, in Netflix’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Pip decides to devote her “EPQ” to discovering who really killed Andie Bell.
Okay, but what the heck is an EPQ? And why does Pippa keep saying “EPQ” again and again in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder?
While it’s true that Pip does spell it out for us at one point — noting that EPQ stands for “Extended Project Qualification” in the UK school system — that doesn’t change how jarring the acronym might be for American viewers.
So what exactly is an EPQ in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder? Can British teens actually become amateur detectives for school credit? Or would Pip have been better served sticking to Gothic Literature, like her mom (Anna Maxwell Martin) suggests? (And how she pivots ahead of her Cambridge admission interview prep…)
Here’s everything you need to know about what the acronym “EPQ” stands for in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder on Netflix…
What Does “EPQ” Mean in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder on Netflix?
As Pip herself explains, “EPQ” stands for Extended Project Qualification. Okay, but what does that mean?
Basically an EPQ is a long-form research project that some British students do in their final year of secondary school. As its title suggests, it’s a project that takes an extended period of time. Months are spent researching a particular project, culminating in a dissertation (usually around 5,000 words). Students could also create piece of art, music, or drama, but there has to be research behind it. The whole idea is that EPQs help prepare teens for college life by forcing them to conduct independent research for a long period of time. (And it’s not unlike the Oxbridge Tutorial system where college students are responsible for researching a paper on a topic and then defending it to their tutors, aka professors.)
The EPQ is a fairly new addition to the British curriculum, which is why Pip actually asks Ravi if he even had to do one when he was in school. That said, how common is it to do your EPQ on a murder mystery? Uh…probably not that common. Which is why everyone predictably acts like it’s super weird that Pip is delving into the cold case. She probably is supposed to be doing an EPQ on Gothic Literature.
