English/Comprehension, reading time

[susanass]

Hi, great site by the way! My DS is sitting the Kent test this September. I received the following information regarding last years test from KCC via email (with regards to timing and number of questions per test):

....As a guide to achieve a 'Grammar' assessment last year a child needed to achive an aggregate score of 320 or more with no less than 106 in anyone paper.
The children are tested in:
English -25 mins - 24 Q + practice
Maths - 25 mins -30 Q + practice
Reasoning - 23 mins 80Q = practice

My question is, with regards to the English comprehension, if they are allowed 25 minutes only to take the test and have 24 questions to answer, are they given extra time to read the extract/text or is the reading time included in the 25minutes? Not sure if this is maybe what the "practice" means above? Otherwise what do they mean by "practice" I'm a bit confused, sorry. thanks

[loobylou]

Hi, I'm not in Kent so hopefully someone with more knowledge of your area will answer soon but I think the answer is probably

1) the reading and question-answering are all part of the 25 minutes and

2) the practice is likely to be 5 minutes or so of them doing a mock question so they work out where to write the answer and to calm their nerves. Some (all?) of dd's exams had practice sections at the beginning.

[mystery]

My child did the test last year and that sounds like what happened in reality. I don't think that there was any time pressure in the English and the raw score to pass was very high - i.e. it was too easy.

Interesting wording "as a guide" ...... it is kind of suggesting that the number of questions will be similar this year (the timing is definitely the same per the stuff on the Kent website) so I wonder if the difficulty will be pumped up, or the length of the reading passage perhaps.

[salsa]

Did the 25 minutes include reading time?

[FortyNinePence]

Yes the 25 minutes included reading time. There was plenty of time though, unlike the Maths.

[susanass]

Thanks for the responses. Just seems very tight having to answer 24 questions in 25 minutes AND read the whole text also, would be good to know roughly how long and complex the text was last year, because if it's anything like in the Bond books, they can be quite time consuming to read and take in depending on the story.

[mystery]

September 2014 English was not pushed for time at all - my child told me she had 10 minutes to spare - but she did not get everything right and it would have been an easy paper to fail as the raw score to get 106 was very high as said elsewhere- because it was too easy. So this year, if they are going to make it as "reliable" as the other papers they need to either increase the number of questions in the English, or make it all more difficult in some way - maybe that could mean a longer passage to read.

I presume the passage is only very short as the English paper I think consisted of three types of thing - comprehension, spotting the spelling errors and completing the sentence with the correct word. The fourth type of GL English question - spot the punctuation error- was not included in the 2014 English test as in 25 minutes one can't do all four question types.

I'd suggest practising with GL multiple choice English papers and also some CEM type comprehension questions in case they do up the difficulty level.

[salsa]

I agree, Bond can have some tricky passages which can take some time for the non factual questions. I wonder how many questions on the passage there would have been?

[NotEnoughHours]

Hi, I was lurking and read this with interest as DS2 is taking the Kent test in Sept. I was under the impression that reasoning was 1hr split pretty much equally between verbal and non-verbal(nonverbal being sub-divided into 4 sections). Was last year's test really 80 questions in 23minutes?

[mystery]

The 80 questions for feasoning is the verbal and non-verbal added together so there was 50 to 60 mins for this - sorry not sure / can't remember exact tines.

Last year there was a question mark until afterwards as to hits the scoring would be done e.g. Which papers would be lumped together and if there would be a minimum score to pass each subject.

Is there a similar question mark this year?