11 Plus Exams Forum

I've been speaking to a fair few parents who are upset that the VR paper seems to have been hard and questions time consuming - anyone else heard this?? Does this mean they may have to adjust the VR scores if a large % of DC's scored low?

That will be taken into account in the standardisation, just depends how many found it hard, but yes if a really hard paper it will be given more weight.

Saying that there were a lot of disappointed people last year whose marks in vr dropped unexpectedly due to a bad paper.

I suppose ultimately they will have the same number of places available at GS and want to fill them.

All the children will have been sitting the same test and some will have done better than others. You could make an exam very easy and need 98% to get a place.. upsetting for all those who get 97.5% .. or you could make it harder and get a place on 50%.

if my DD is right and has has scored very well on the English and well on the maths - can you still swing it to 303 with a 50% in the VR ( hard to be exact , I know) ???

It's not the scores themselves that matter, it's how your DC has done when compared with the other DC sitting the test. There's no point in getting angry that the papers were hard - they're supposed to be. Everyone sits the same papers so it really doesn't matter. The other thread shows a real mix of opinion about the difficulty of each paper. Different DC have different strengths. If anything, you don't want an easy paper as it won't give your DC a chance to show what they can do.

This is a tough old wait until March. Hang in there!

I remember reading similar posts following last year's exam and the replies were you should expect a drop of 10% to 15% on the marks your dc was getting in practice papers.

Just like what Araucana girl has mentioned it all depends the overall performance of all the DCs that sat for the test. The mean pass mark of a particular paper will be the standard for which a particular DC's mark is compare to (ie. any extra marks above the mean will raise the final score accordingly). What you want is for your DC to have the same feeling with regard to the difficulty of a particular paper and not the opposite!

My DS has come out saying VR was fine (but time consuming, and he didn't do the last question-or even guess it-grrrr!) but English was tricky and has some hard vocab. He said there were some hard questions on the Maths, but ones that we'd gone through in recent weeks, so he said he thought he knew the techniques.

Most of his friends thought the English was fine though...!

Whoever came up with the quote "ignorance is bliss" probably hasn't met 11+ parents ;-0

The VR paper is a real test of speed, technique and accuracy. Doing 80 questions in 50 minutes is hard. Doing 80 questions in 50 minutes under exam conditions is harder. Doing 80 questions in 50 minutes having sat a maths and english paper is even harder. That is why it is not unusual for VR scores to be 10-15% lower than practice papers. On top of this, the actual VR papers are not released to the public so we have little evidence on the difficulty of any paper other the second hand comments of candidates and speculating on scores.

At the end of the day, it is how the candidates perform relative to other candidates that is relevant. If you are strong in a particular subject, you want that paper to be hard so that not all the scores are bunched up between 90 and 100% as it would be difficult to distinguish the candidates.

To answer skenty's question on scores, it is the standardised scores that is relevant, with the mean being 100 and the highest score around 130. The actual % scored is irrelevant - take a look at the 2011 english papers where the mean score was around 50% but that would still have translated into a standardised score of 100. The lowest ranked score in a subject (and it doesnt matter if that score was 1% below second lowest score or 30% lower) would still result in a standardised score of around 70.

Assuming you are looking at around the 303 cut-off mark, then the closest 2012 scores posted in these forums are:

English 38% Maths 80% VR 54% standardised score of 309.63
English 48% Maths 44% VR 64% standardised score of 307.374
English 52% Maths 44% VR 54% standardised score of 298.917

Based on the 73 scores posted for 2012 in these forums which will be skewed, the mean scores for English, Maths and VR score were 57.7%, 64.0% and 74.8% respectively with a mean standardised score of 340.1.

I've said it elsewhere, but my advice is to try to stop speculating and wait for the actual results. Good luck !

Hi everyone
My ds mange to finish 39 VR questions and guess the others, he don't know if he did well in math and English or not, he also cried at the vr exam, and complained that it was so hot, he get sweetie and get dizzy because the sun was direct on his head and back (afternoon exam).Also he didn’t sleep well for three nights before the exam, I don’t think he got any chance now as Vr his strength subject. We had a look in the local school, but we didn’t decide yet