What's Happened

[Tree]

the whole coaching issue is interesting because if you look on the nfer website on 'does coaching help' or whatever they quote 2 papers one from the 80's which is only a few years after i took the 11+! which says that you get little return after a small amout of familiarisation and one paper from more recently that says the more coaching you do the better it seems obvious to me that coaching helps and it must be really rare for children to pass who have no coaching at all. Probably what the grammar schools are getting is a combination of kids who are naturally good at vr and who have parents who really value grammar schools and can afford tuition but i suspect if you have a system which makes any kind of assesment at 11 that some children will get disadvantaged and it will be impossible to come up with a test that doesn't have this bias the important thing in my view is not getting the test right but making it much easier to transfer between schools over the next few years based on more traditional measures of academic achievement like sats and comitment etc.

i can't believe i'm posting on here this late at night i love this site but it is a little sad

[zee]

It's very easy to get wound up about the "unfairness" of 11+ for those from less advantaged homes.

However, the danger of that is that it overlooks the much wider problem: as a GROUP, such children are disadvantaged before they even start Reception, do less well in SATs, GCSEs, A levels, jobs etc.

That is NOT to say that some children from such backgrounds don't come overcome those disadvantages, but I just think it's odd to focus on only one academic hurdle, when they're all related.

[BlimeyG'vnor]

Thank you Sally-Anne for the offer of a new thread, but I'm happy to just go with the flow!

I still feel that the amount of tutoring the goes on now days has pushed the pass mark so high that it is becoming impossible to pass unless you put in a ridiculous amount hours preparation. I wonder where it will all end.

Also, I did call a well known local tutor whilst considering our options, and they proudly told me that they could get an average child through no problem. This is where I think it is all falling down. Sally-Anne's son was obviously a bright boy who is coping well, but I know in my eldest daughter's class at high school there are quite a few children that are really struggling. Not good for them and not good for the rest of the class. In "my day" after the first year at high school, those that were really struggling had to leave. Perhaps if we had this system now, it would deter parents of children unsuited to high/grammar to really consider what is best for their child.

[BlimeyG'vnor]

Whoops. I meant it would deter them from sending a child to a school where they would find it difficult to cope, and encourage them to consider the school that would really get the best from their child.

Sorry for mess-up in last post. Trying to cook Sunday roast and engage brain at same time is obviously not a good combination !

[zee]

I still feel that the amount of tutoring the goes on now days has pushed the pass mark so high that it is becoming impossible to pass unless you put in a ridiculous amount hours preparation.

The "mark" is, in some ways, an arbitrary number.

There are still (roughly) the same number of grammar places and same number of applicants.

[BlimeyG'vnor]

Not really. Many ( many) years ago, before tutoring was common place, and most pupils sat the exam having only done the school practise papers, 75% would have been a pass mark in Bucks, and indeed a jolly good score.

Agreed, the number of places available has not changed, but through tutoring a larger number of pupils are able to get a higher percentage correct. This means that the pass mark is higher, because like you say, the number of available places does not increase but the average score has increased. Therefore, a child just completing the school practise sessions ( as an example) will become more and more dis-advantaged as time moves on.

[zee]

Huh?? If the percentage of pupils who qualify is approximately the same, what's the problem?

It doesn't matter if that threshold is called 5, 79 or 3410 marks, or if the percentage score is 10%, 70% or 99%, the pass rate is the same!

(It's like Scottish farmers complaining about changing the clocks or not changing them - they still have fewer hours of daylight in the winter than SE England, regardless of whether sun rise is at something we call 6am, 9am or Flibble!).

[BlimeyG'vnor]

I think you are missing the point, the pass rate remains the same whilst the number of places and applicant remains constant, I think that's obvious.

The pass mark however is increased as more and more tutoring takes place. This becomes a vicious circle, an intelligent child that could be expected to pass on a blind test, must now be tutored to compete with less able children being given highly intensive coaching, even the brightest can have an off day and the margin for error now is tiny.


You can have it out with the Scottish farmers on a different forum

[Tree]

i think blimey has the crucial point if the pass mark keeps rising then the test becomes less meaningfull as it starts to rely more and more on a few questions to take the absurd if the 121 referred to 79 out of 80 or 99% then it will all come down to the answer to 1 single fiendishly difficult question which would obviously be a poor way to decide what school a child should go to. I was wondering if the ideal testing would now be a combination of loads of tests vr non vr maths science english hums in otherwise sats + 11+ course work school reports etc etc it would be much less likely that simple coaching would help and any work that was done would help the kids in the long run anyway

[pippi]

Ergo, the children whose parents have either sufficient money or sufficient education themselves to provide that familiarity are more likely to pass.

That leaves a lot of less well-off children out in the cold.

The question that we should be debating is: "What is the solution?"

Surely the test could be improved, as Tree suggests, by not relying on VR? As I understand it the source for the Bucks statement on VR is the Nfer wbsite again, which says:

Any one VR test cannot therefore be seen as a culture-fair test and should ideally be used only with a homogeneous population with common language and educational experience. A criticism of this type of intelligence test is that it only provides a single global score, usually a standardised score, that gives a very limited view of a person’s ability. This can be contrasted to the much more complete view provided by a multiple abilities battery designed to assess a wider range of intelligence factors. However, VR tests are highly reliable (for tests of around 90 questions, internal consistency reliabilities are typically in the order of 0.95) and good predictors of future academic attainment (for example, correlations with school exams taken over five years later are above 0.70).

The only plus I can see in this is that the test is reliable, ie that it reliably gives a very limited view of a person's ability.

I still find the new advice to parents on coaching bizarre:

The benefits or otherwise of entering a child into a coaching programme is a judgment that only parents can make knowing the circumstances and disposition of their individual child.

What sort of circumstances and disposition are we supposed to be looking for? If we have to make this judgement, what's the point of the test? I've never seen anyone explain the benefits of selecting children at age 10-11 based on their parents view of their circumstances and disposition. IMO this is completely different from claiming you can select on academic aptitude...