Tiffin & GL assessment

[Saffron]

Well it's highly unlikely that my DC will be offered a place at Tiffin Boys in March. We've accepted that and moved on. But I've been thinking about all the papers that we completed over the last year preceding the exam and I was wondering how close the GL assessment papers are to the real exam. For both non-verbal and verbal GL papers my DC was scoring between 85% and 93% - so he never scored lower than 85% on any of the papers and never higher than 93%, and was often somewhere in between. So for those of you whose DC scored above last year's cutoff score and are in with a good chance of a place, what % range were they achieving on these papers? It's really just for my own curiosity now, and maybe your answers will help others preparing their DC for the next set of exams.

Thanks

[fatbananas]

That is an interesting question, Saffron.

Which other schools are you aiming at? It all feels a bit of a scrum in this part of London.

[fatbananas]

Sorry, should've said, I couldn't help directly with the question because DS only in year 4 but your DS's results for those papers are, frankly, excellent; so if you need higher than that, it's eye-watering!

[tiffinboys]

In the weeks before the exam, DC was doing VR at in the range of 90-100% and NVR 85-95%. Before GL, DC had done some other practice papers too, some quite harder than GL practice papers. My DC comments were after the exam that the exam papers were much harder than the GL practice papers.

Before Tiffin test, DC sat for Slough test and this was helpful as GL set both tests, though the level of difficulty was higher in case of Tiffins (my DC's view).

[TiffinGirls]

This is a few years ago, but my DD was getting perhaps 1 or 2 questions wrong on the practice papers (the GL/NFER) etc and got a very high score indeed when she sat the actual test. In those days it was said that above 85% would get you in.

In her year there were girls who were tutored for two years or so and my DD thought it was fairly obvious who had been over-tutored - or perhaps they just got lucky on the day.

I think nowadays you are really looking at close to full marks and any mistake such as transposed answers or misreading a question is a disaster.

[Saffron]

Thanks for all your replies. I think you're right TiffinGirls, there's very little room for error nowadays - bad news for the future fatbananas as the scores are increasing year on year.

Tiffinboys I was wondering what papers are harder than GL? I'm interested as I may be going down this route again in future (sucker for punishment me!) and I think I'd start earlier with GL and then move onto these harder papers.

I don't think the multiple choice format suited my DC, as it was too easy to just pick an answer rather than working it out systematically - this was our problem both at home with practice papers and clearly in the exam too. He would fly through the answer sheets - tick tick tick - there was always something else he'd rather be doing than those papers! (...and I can't say I blame him!) I think a standard format would have suited him better, forcing him to put his brain in gear and work things out from the start.

Well done to your DC TiffinGirls and Tiffinboys

[bravado]

Tiffinboys I was wondering what papers are harder than GL? I'm interested as I may be going down this route again in future (sucker for punishment me!) and I think I'd start earlier with GL and then move onto these harder papers.

Sorry to butt-in from Essex...
From our experience of DIY'ing DD2 with pretty much all the well-known VR papers, we found that The Walsh books 1 - 3 were the hardest. The Daughtrey "Bright Sparks" series came next. By the end of our prep for the Essex superselectives she was scoring anything from 73 to 79/80 for Walsh, with an "on-the-day" score of 73/80. I hope that helps a little

[TiffinGirls]

Yes, Walsh were the famous Tiffin tutors and some of my daughter's friends were tutored by them. I think the vocab is particularly challenging in their papers. I also found that when my younger dyslexia daughter sat the test about four years ago she got a high mark in the NVR and a middling one in the VR, while she had been over 95% in both on practice papers at home. From memory we used many papers from another 11 plus site I am not allowed to name on here!

I think she fell foul of the double meanings and trickier vocab questions, as her spelling in reading and writing was quite poor at the time. In my opinion that was the strength of tutoring in the old days - the tutors figured out there were only a certain number of possible words and made sure the candidates knew them.