Hello,
Please help. DD recently sat a mock exam from SD for GL and scored 67% for VR and 69% for NVR and Maths. Is this a good score- I am a bit worried as the average score on both papers were 70% and the top 30% of the cohort achieved around the 77% mark. I understand the raw score depends on the achievement of the cohort and so if DD does not achieve the grades within the top 30%, irrespective of the raw score, she will not get in, is this correct? Pease help as I am quite anxious now.

Shafeena

The cohort you need to worry about is the one sitting the actual Bucks Transfer Test not a mock. No-one I know has ever sat a mock as they get a practice session in school anyway.

We live outside Bucks hence the need to do a mock as primarily schools here do not offer any support.

Bucks Primaries can't help their children either.

Everyone gets a practice though and in the place where they will sit the real test.

I presume you are near enough to a GS get a place should she qualify?

As above really. The cohort for which you've been given statistics won't be anything like the cohort that sits the Bucks test. For a start, I assume the mock was for a select few that paid for it, whereas the real thing is sat by almost every child in Bucks. That makes a big difference to the cohort so it is impossible to extrapolate predicted performance in one to the other.

More importantly, your post suggests a possible gap in your knowledge of the Bucks test. As Guest55 asks, are you living somewhere where qualification could lead to a place? Lots of parents enter the Bucks process every year, oblivious to the allocation process, and are disappointed when they don't get a place because they live too far away.

Shafeena, I've sent you a PM

Would also love to hear from other people about what they think the SD mock test pass mark is likely to be - my son got 67% in paper one and 59% in paper two and difficult to tell how this compares to the real thing.

We can all guess what it might be (my guess is 54%) but that won't help you at all. There is no such thing as a "mock test pass mark" because there is no equivalence between the mock test cohort and that of the real thing. Your son's 67% on paper one might not be enough for a qualifying score in the real thing and his paper two score might place him as one of the top standardised scorers in the real thing. It all depends upon the paper and the cohort's performance on it.

As I understand it, the only information you receive for the mock, aside from the score, is a ranking so you can see how your child performed relative to others but again, that's not a great deal of help because you are looking at a self-selected cohort of coached children, not the all-in cohort of Bucks children.