Daogroupie wrote:
Great posts Oldtrout and crazycrofter.
Oldtrout, what year did your dd sit? Did she have a comprehension? Is the English VR 50% of the score?
Thanks DG
Hi Dragroupie:
DD1 (little fish - currently Year 11 local comprehensive) will have sat the 11+ in 2013 for start Sept 2014.
DD2 (small fry - currently Y9 CHG) will have sat the 11+ in 2015 for start Sept 2016.
Yes, both DDs had comprehension questions on the Birmingham grammar schools exam (King Edward VI schools & Bishop Vesey). You can find out more about the exact exam content here:
https://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/forum/11plus/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=14423The fabulous Ken R - puts all this information together for parents once offers have been made - but you can e-mail him after the exam with information as your child remembers it at the time and he compiles it all (because different people focus on different things) and comes up with a summary of the entire exam. I did this after both my DDs took the exam because we benefited from previous people contacting Ken R with this kind of information.
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I genuinely don't know how the scores are broken down for the Birmingham exam - but my impression (which may be unfair) is that the King Edward VI/ Bishop Vesey/ Sutton Coldfield Girls' exam is more heavily weighted toward children with strong verbal skills (indeed little fish is off the charts good at maths/ sciences but has always been a lot weaker with reading/ comprehension/ vocab & writing skills).
Having been there and done that - and with hindsight and some time to see the benefit of both outcomes for both children (who are very different characters) - I do feel that Little fish's 213 and small fry's 235 (which just made offer day entry) both made sense in terms of how they were doing on 10 minute bonds/ practice papers & how they were operating verbally at that time.
I also think there is a strong advantage to being a bit younger when taking the test. Small fry had no benefit because her birthday was so close to the exam date; whereas, little fish's birthday was well into the school year. I can't swear that made a difference but let's say being 10 years and 6 months at the exam benefits you 12 points (2 pts a month) - you can see that there wasn't a lot of difference in ability between small fry and little fish at the exam. A few lucky guesses, a sister helping us with practice by pointing out things like nets aren't on the exam (we spent ages over them with little fish because she found them so hard - kind of wasted time really) and the advent of cloze practice books (which weren't available for small fry) all made those little differences 2nd time around in our case, I think.
Hope that helps & makes sense.
OT
PS Hopefully somebody (Ken R? Um?) can come along and explain how the test sections are weighted. I'm afraid I don't know.