Flattery or hijacking?

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Christine

Flattery or hijacking?

Post by Christine »

Many parents have mentioned in passing this website to me in recent months. However everytime I tried to access it I ended up in a red site run by IPS, which is frankly is no where near useful as this site now that I have finally found it.

I now realise that they copied this site name and bought the ".com" name of it, where as this site is ".co.uk". My son says he did some research and this original site was set up in August 2004 and they copied the name in April 2005. He says they also own bucks11plus, kent11plus, elevenplus, IPSpublishing etc.

As a parent it is quite distressing enough trying to find relevant and useful information for 11 plus (well done this website) without finding half the websites have been hijacked by just two publishers and lead to the same red pages of theirs.

I think there should be a law against companies who abuse the internet and hijack good website names to sell their own products. If they are any good they would create a following of their own without jumping on the coat tails of website such as this.

C Forbes

P. S. Can we have more information of Lincolnshire on this website please.
patricia
Posts: 2803
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2006 5:07 pm

Post by patricia »

Cant comment on the 'hijacking' as i dont know the full facts.

However, IPS are without a doubt one of the best, if not the best, for 11 plus verbal reasoning [ particularly for the Buckinghamshire tests ]
Christine

Post by Christine »

Patricia, irrespective of what you think about IPS material - I am not from Buckinghamshire so cannot comment - I can tell you that I wasted enormous amount of time trying to get to this website because IPS jumped on the coat tails of this websites name and reputation.

If you are in doubt you will see that this name (.co.uk) was registered on 26th July 2004 and IPS bought theirs (.com) on 14th April 2005. Given they already owned elevenplus.com, bucks11plus, kent11plus etc there is no other concievable reason to buy out this name. Plainly if they had any prior interest in this name they could have bought it three years earlier when they set up their website.

If you are in doubt about the above facts my 11 year old son tells me you can look up the facts on www.whois.com and www.whois.co.uk

If their material/reputation was as great as you claim then they would have already established themselves in 2002 under their own site elevenplus.com and they would have not had any reason in April 2005 to jump on another sites coat tails!.

For your information I attach the .com's details from www.whois.com:

Registrant:
Internet Primary School Ltd
King's Head Centre
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire HP20 2RW
UK

Domain name: ELEVENPLUSEXAMS.COM

Administrative Contact:
Stevens, Nicholas Stevens @elevenplus.com
Kings Head Centre
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire HP20 2RW
UK
+44.8700500303 Fax: +44.1419317001

Record last updated on 14-Apr-2005.
Record expires on 14-Apr-2006.
Record created on 14-Apr-2005.

What concievable explanation is there, especially if you consider that this website sells IPS material already?

All I am saying is that there is plenty on this website from a lot of people, including your contributions in the forum, which are of use and interest to me and other parents without wasting time visiting the same red site over and over again under half a dozen different names. If anything it has been a put off for me.
patricia
Posts: 2803
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2006 5:07 pm

Post by patricia »

Point taken!
Mike Edwards

Post by Mike Edwards »

I am not quite sure what the point is.

Surely at the time of developing this site the owner would have had the opportunity to purchase all domain names starting www.elevenplusexams

It is my understanding that the site has evolved past the purposes and expectations of the site owner.

As we live in a so called free society and the Internet is a competitive market place, if I wanted to "corner the market" or dominate the market I would do my best to do so without any thought to my competitors.

In the case of IPS they appear to be a successful marketting company producing good quality materials, the only criticism that I could see is that by dominating the Internet they create an obstacle for parents who are looking for free and independent advice.

A much bigger problem for 11+ "amateur parents" occurs on the bookshelves of every bookstore throughout the country who stock their shelves with so-called verbal reasoning practice papers where the content of such papers bares little resemblance to the real tests. IPS cannot be accused of doing this wheras other publishers can be.
Guest

Post by Guest »

I can't see this is a problem, if you type in eleven plus this site comes up in the top 5 choices it took me seconds to find it. This is much quicker than most searches on the internet!
Diane

Post by Diane »

The chat forums on this website are on the whole fans of IPS (Patricia, Mike, Mel etc) , but I think their faith is wrongly placed. Last year I purchased IPS papers to ready my daughter for this year’s exams, in fact exam day is Saturday.

I found many errors in the papers, big and small, which was very off putting during timed revision practice. I wrote to the Internet Primary School and never got a reply. For example in the book of 10 maths papers I saw questions like:

“Jane’s mother is 3 times as old as Jane was 2 years ago. If Jane’s mum is 42, how old is Jean?” (Jane had suddenly become Jean !!!!!)

Above was Test 10 Q 27 – Plainly a typing error but a child is not to know this. Surely somebody should have fully checked the paper before publishing this for around £10 a book, moreover my daughter got up in the middle of the test and told me questions “were impossible” having spent more time than necessary on such questions and therefore not enough time on others). Another thing I did not like was when I purchased these tests I thought I was buying 10 papers of 50 minutes each, it turned out that these were 30 minute tests with 30 questions each.

Other minor errors were grammatical, for instance misplaced full-stops inside brackets, or art work – arrows for parallel lines were off the diagram.

I think websites like this should be very careful in blindly recommending publishers. In my experience only Nfer and Bond papers are error free.


P.S. Good luck this Saturday to all the other KEGS mums
Guest

Post by Guest »

Diane

I have also found errors in Bond, although NFER is very accurate. Sometimes, I know, that it looks as if there was an error, but then on closer examination, the error was mine!! However, on the Bond Exam Papers (they are very new out), there were terrible mistakes in the NVR and I know that I was right this time. I agree, it is very demoralising for children to do tests with errors in them.

On NFER - there are some examples that beggar belief, for example, "the FS of her coat" - how many people refer to the folds of one's coat? How many children know about fermenting wine (another NFER question). I sometimes wonder who the authors are aiming their questions at and also how culture fair they are. Bond can also be very old fashioned with words such as "dear" for expensive.

J
Guest

Post by Guest »

I think it is a bit of an exaggeration by Mike Edwards to say off the shelf verbal reasoning papers bare little resemblance to the real tests. I have managed to send one child into a grammar school in Sutton by tutoring myself using bookstore papers such as Bond,AFN, NFER & IPS and preparing another one for this year.

I have found all publishers' papers have the odd errors in them. Incidentally I have bought Mr Edward's own VR papers from this site, my child and I have found them to be as good as an average off the shelf paper.

An Amateur Parent
Guest

Post by Guest »

I am the guest who said there were errors in Bond - I also said that their exam papers were new out - well they are not, because they are on Amazon. So there really is no excuse for any erros in them.
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