It's all over....... 5 week countdown to results

[Bob1892]

B/Ham and Warks is more difficult as:-

(a) Bucks and Kent didn't switch from Grammars to Comps in the 1970s and so the proportion grammar places is very much higher. For B/Ham you are looking at about the 87th percentile and above of candidates (viz. only about 1 in 7)
(b) it's been going longer and so the historical degree of difficulty has become a de-facto std.
(c) LEAs or Schools Consortium can instruct Durham CEM on the degree of difficulty of the exam.

However please bear in mind that the initial 1st year Warks CEM exam this was significantly easier than the corresponding B/ham exam, but became broadly equivalent in difficulty in the following years.

Just out of interest KenR if dc have been saying it was easy as seems to be the general consensus on this forum (bar my ds!) will cut offs be raised or will the raw scores required
to gain a certain sd score have to be so much higher?
I'm wondering if vza's formula to work out the sd score from the raw score be thrown out of the window if the above is the case?

[KenR]

Hi Bob

In theory if the exam was easier then the raw scores required to achieve a particular standardised score would rise, however the pass scores would be unchanged. I suspect we will only find out in March when those parents on the borderline request details of their raw scores by paper or section

[meldan103]

I shall take nothing for granted, but the majority of children that we know who took the exam on Saturday said it was a lot easier than they thought and timings were not that bad. I suppose we will have to wait until March to find out if they ate correct

[Bob1892]

I've come to learn that you should take what dc say about any type of test with a large pinch of salt - well certainly in my dc's cases

[Happyface]

results wait begins here too: I thought I'll be 'new/wiser me' after the test, but to my surprise after reading comments about 'easy' cem tests, I'm back to worrying. Bob, your posts regarding this makes sense that kids might have found it easy because dps have been drumming it in that how hard/impossible to finish it's going to be. Assume that a cem test was genuienly easy, what is the school trying to achieve by that?

[Bob1892]

I think what has happened is this: dps are a lot more switched on about cem tests now - there are many books/online tests out for these types of tests.
Dps know they have to push their kids hard to get through a cem test- hard vocab, gcse maths, varied nvr inc cubes/nets/3d etc
Kids have been frightened witless
Now it's all relative - kids are saying that it wasn't half as bad as dps have made out.
It's really going to come down to dcs being age standardised with the general cohort but more importantly within their own age (by month) - which is what age-standardisation does ultimately.
Eg how has your June born dc compared to other June born dc - that's what it boils down to.

[Happyface]

does that mean my october born child will have to score 'significantly' high than a June born to get the qual. score? or is it just 2-3 marks difference?

[Bob1892]

A September born child on average needs around an extra 6% raw score than an August born child in a cem test.
But ultimately it'll come down to your October born child being compared to other October born dc.
It's a complex affair this standardisation business to be honest.
It's driving me half mad to get my head round it.

[MSD]

An easier exam is surely bad news for older cohort but great for younger ones. I would expect the younger children to do as well on an easier exam in terms of raw score, but greatly benefit on standardisation.

MSD

[Bob1892]

I think KenR had some very useful info on this somewhere.
In your case an October dc will, in a typical cem test, need around an extra 5 raw marks per paper compared to a June dc to achieve the same sd score. That's around 10 marks for the test.
Then they incorporate the same month comparison variable into the equation somehow.
The idea of all this obviously is to make the test a level playing field which I hope it does as my dc is a summer born dc.
Historically there is a preponderance of autumn dc in a GS than summer born dc.