11 Plus Exams Forum

Maybe somebody can help me work this out! The highest standardised score for a child born in August -if they get 100% raw score is 142, What is the highest score for a child born on 1st Sept and gets 100% raw score?? Just to get an idea of the range of highest score because I think the oldest child would never be awarded 142 after standardisation. It would be good to know that.
Thanks.

Is it not standardised against their age score?

Standardisation is not punitive i.e. it does not take marks away from an older child, it just takes into account that equally able younger children may obtain a lower raw score. If a Septemnber child scored a maximum 100% raw score then they would receive the maximum stadardised score 140/141.

The way to look at it is that a child born in August may require less than 100% raw score in order to achieve the maximum standardised score of 140/141 whereas the September born child possibly needs 100%. But for it to be fair both would have to be able to score the maximum mark possible.

Age standardisation is not so important for the top end of the score as they will all get a place if that is their first preference school. Hence I would have thought for both DCs who scored 100% in their raw score will get the same maximum standardised score. The DC who is younger will probably ranked 1st and the older DC second on the ranking list.

I agree that any candidate that gets 100% raw score in both exams will get their school of choice.

It is not correct, however, to say that a younger child will be ranked above an older child if they have the same standardised score but same (or higher) percentage raw score. It is the standardised score that matters, if these are the same (whether 280, 245 or 230 etc.) then the candidates are deemed to be equal and the school's tie break rule comes into play for ranking purposes. Normally this is distance from the school.

On a typical standardisation table, a child who was 10y0m with a raw score of 100% would be given a standardised score of 141, whereas a child who was 10y11m with a raw score of 100% would be given a standardised score somewhere in the one-hundred-and-thirties, depending on the mean raw score and the standard deviation. For example, my DS1 scored 100% in his Y4 CATs, but was given a standardised score of 139 as his birthday is in February, not August. If you could get some high-end scores from some of the children who just took the test (along with their month of birth) then you could possibly speculate on the top end of the standardisation table,i.e. how a raw score of 100% would translate into different standardised scores for children of different ages.

In the hypothetical situation described above, the August-born child who got a raw score of 100% on both papers might get a standardised score of 282. The September-born child who got a raw score of 100% on both papers would get a lower standardised score, so be lower in the ranking. If two children have the same standardised score, I believe the schools in the consortium would use distance as a tie-breaker if only one place were left to fill. However, that would not be needed until much further down the rankings and at much lower standardised scores than the ones we are discussing on this thread.

If you have a paper (let's say in Maths) that is 'too easy' then the mean raw score would be very high (let's say somewhere in the forties out of fifty). This would affect the standardisation table in such a way that even dropping one or two marks from the raw score would lead to a massive drop in the standardised score. This would mean that children who are confident in Maths and were regularly getting over 90% in practice papers could feel that they had performed really well on the day and then receive an email with a score below 120. I'm just speaking hypothetically, of course...

But if this is true then it is impossible for an older child to score maximum marks? Surely maximum marks must equal maximum standardisd score?

That just isn't how age standardization works. Children are compared with children from their birth month. Older children do not lose or get lower marks than younger children. As a general rule younger children will not score as highly as older kids so the average score may be lower. If the average score of August born kids turns out to be the same as September born kids no age standardization will take place. In the unlikely but possible event that the average score of the August born kids is higher than the September born kids, age standardization would be to the benefit of the September born kids. The higher children score the less impact age standardization has on the score. Any child scoring 100% would be awarded the full standardized mark whatever month they were born in.