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score out of 141

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007 8:55 pm
by selena
SO the paper has 80 questions, are we told our child's score out of 80 or is it the standardized score out of 141?
My daughter's birthday is 6 Nov and I don't understand how the date of birth can affect your score. Any advice?

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2007 9:17 pm
by Sally-Anne
Hi Selena

Ooooh - my favourite subject! :(

Standardisation is a dreadful concept, and I think most of us really have only the haziest idea how it really works. For a full understanding, try here, and the NFER link from that page:

http://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/standa ... scores.php

If you fall at the first hurdle on all of that (as I always have done), the approximate pass mark for Bucks is 86%. A November birthday will need to score around 90% to pass.

Sally-Anne

age standardisation

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 1:43 pm
by gfp
Sally-Anne wrote:
Standardisation is a dreadful concept, and I think most of us really have only the haziest idea how it really works.

Sally-Anne
I think the reason that most of us have only a hazy idea of how it works is that we're not being told!

The links you give only tell us why standardisation is applied. The NFER website's page on "age standardisation" pretends to explain it but it gives a standardisation formula that takes no account of age and a useless table. We all know actual figures vary each year but NFER must have plenty of historical data that could be used to illustrate now age standardiation works.

The bit that worries me from the above page is

"This is because pupils are, in effect, only being compared with other pupils of the same age as themselves."

"in effect"! Does that mean that they're not actually "only being compared with other pupils of the same age"? Are they just applying some previously calculated penalty to give the effect?

I would like to read some published research into how test scores vary with age and how the correction is applied, but maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment.

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 4:10 pm
by KenR
Your might find is useful to take a look at the process in relation KS2 national tests for 2007 - there is quite a good explanation at http://www.qca.org.uk/libraryAssets/med ... 05_wo1.pdf

The thing to bear in mind is that Age Standardisation is a statistical/mathematical process that can be applied across a range of disciplines (not just Educational testing). It is used in situations where there is irrefutable empirical evidence of the effect of age on experimental or test results. (as in the casde of 11+ tests)

In the case of 11+ or Key Stage tests, the effects of age for a particular test are usually obtained by trialing tests or questions against a large statistical sample to produce a National Standisation.

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 6:50 pm
by Guest
I did not think they took age into consideration in the key stage tests. At least that is what we were told after the key stage 1 results came out at the end of year 2.

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:00 pm
by KenR
It's slightly confusing. The threshold results use the raw scores but the overall level table results are Age Standardised for KS2 as you can see from the report.

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:06 pm
by Guest55
The pupils are not given age standardised levels - these tables are not really used by schools in my experience! Especially as all children now tend to stasrt school at the same time.

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 7:21 pm
by KenR
I should perhaps add one more point.

There is an anomoly regarding anone who have been allocated a score of 141. To quote from the QCA report:-
Very low and very high age standardised scores are printed in the tables as ***. This means that they would be below 70 or above 140, but cannot be calculated with the necessary degree of statistical reliability. If an exact score is needed, for example, to calculate an average for the class, 69 or 141 should be used for these pupils.
The same applies to 11+ Age Standardisation, so if 2 candidates each scored 141 this doesn't means that they both scored the same, it just means that they scored so highly they were not able to accurately calculate an age standardised score so they just allocated 141 as the highest avalable. So it's perfectly possible in theory that two children of the same age achieving raw scores of say 75/80 or 80/80 respectively could each get a standardised score of 141! Of course this would depend of the degree of difficulty of the particular test.

This was one of the issues with the old Warwickshire 11+ exams where a high percentage of candidates were allocated a score of 141. The reason why there were so many high scores was because test scores were Age Standardised against a National Sample of chilren of average ability rather than the 11+ candidate entry which is normally the case.

There may be something unusual as well with the Bucks Age Standardisation as the average should be 100 but isn't. (See previous discussions on this with Patricia et al - not sure if we ever got to the bottom of this)

scoring?

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 9:49 am
by nina
Please can someone help i am getting my self in a right state trying to work out this scoring system i still dont know what to think, My daughters teacher told us that they take the highest paper and double the score but people are telling me this is not true , please can someone tell me if my daughter did well on paractice she was 10y10m on day of test and her practice papers were averaging about 62 out of 80, would this be a pass???? please someone help thanks you

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 10:07 am
by Sally-Anne
Hi Nina

You've had some serious mis-information there!

If you look at the link on standardisation above it may help you to sort this out. On the other hand it may not!

As one of the oldest children in the year group your daughter would need to score around 90% to achieve a pass mark, so I am afraid that 62/80 would not be a pass. However, please remember that she only needs to score a pass mark on one of the two papers - the other score is irrelevant.

Many children do manage to pull out all the stops on the day, so please don't despair. If she is a near miss when the results come out please do post back on the Appeals section for further advice.

Kind regards
Sally-Anne

Edit: Nina, I have just noticed that you have posted the same request in two other places. I have deleted the post under "Everything Else" as your question is related to Bucks and will be best answered here.