11 Plus Exams Forum

As the results day looms, I am trying to come up with any logical argument to cling on to, to keep hoping.

Our situation was, despite all the best will in the world, we couldn't do much prep at home and had to spend all of the Easter break with no work.

At the time my DD did the QMGS exam, we just went in without any exam mindset, more so because we knew it was a practise run. DD hadn't done any papers by then.

However, during the 9weeks of summer, I and DD worked very efficiently, and I could see the big jump she took in performance, both in the practice papers at home and the subsequent work that she is now doing in her class in Year 6. She has gone ahead of all of the top of the class peers, moved from top of the middle set to the top set and it has boosted her confidence significantly. It is really rewarding to see this.

Logic tells me that, because she scored ok in QMGS, and she did significantly more targetted prep in summer, her KE score might be better than this. But then, logic also tells me that this might be the same for a lot of the children who also did QMGS as a prep run...

Has anyone else been in our situation and saw that major improvement in scores between the two exams?

Don't panic. Don't stress. Many children perform differently during the two exams and they are correlated differently by a different emphasis on different parts of the exam. 224 may yet get your ds into QMGS. It is a very good school. If you are looking at the Birmingham or Sutton Coldfield Grammars then slightly lower scores may get your ds into them.

Apologies I see you are talking about your dd I should have read your posting more carefully. What I said earlier is even more emphatic. Your daughter will get her place at QMHS. It is 15marks higher than last years eventual cut off. My other remarks about the Birmingham and Sutton Coldfield exams remain the same.

It will be very interesting for us too to see the difference in the score, ds did some work before qm but was still slow on time and he told me he tried really hard but the timing was very strict and left around 15 or more questions which made me very worried but he scored very well. We too worked hard during summer, the timing improved a lot and we also did a lot on vocab and exam technique, he told me he completed all areas and only missed 4 close words. Most people consider Birmingham exam harder so therefore we are not expecting our Ds to score very highly, but it will be interesting to see if the extra work made any difference.