CSSE Standardised scoring

[Chocoholic83]

Wondered if anyone could answer a few questions I have please. I was wondering if exam are standardised based on weighting of the individual difficulty levels of each question prior to the exam being administered? Or is it dependent on a ranking system such as how many children got the correct answer/% of test correct? For example if lots of children got the same question wrong their mark overall wouldn't be as low as a child who got a question wrong that lots of children got right? I know age isn't taken into consideration with CSSE but are boys and girls standardised separately or as a whole? Thanks

[mum of boys]

I think this is how it works:

The standardised score is calculated using the mean and standard deviation of all the test scores once the papers have been marked. Individual questions are not weighted differently depending on how they have been answered. As far as I'm aware, the scores are not standardised separately for boys and girls, but don't forget - that doesn't matter at all as the boys and girls are not competing for the same school places.

There is a link to a thread somewhere that includes the standardisation formula for different years.

There will be people on the forum who know much more than me - apologies if I've got it wrong!

[streathammum]

As far as I know, the difficulty of a question is not a factor in standardisation.

So if a question is considered difficult it may be worth 3 marks, whereas an easy question is only worth 1 mark. A child's total number of marks is added up to give their raw score - this score is then standardised.

Some exams don't give more marks to harder questions, they are all worth the same amount and it's up to the child to decide how much time to spend on each question (no point spending ages on a tricky sum if it's only worth the same mark as a simple one). Sometimes as child is able to see how many marks a question is worth and sometimes they're not.

There are no "bonus" marks for getting a question right that no one else did. The questions will be worth the same amount for all candidates (if it's worth 1 mark for candidate A it will be worth 1 mark for candidate B, regardless of any other factors).

If children sit two tests and one is "harder" than the other (ie the average raw scores of one are lower than the other) the standardisation process brings them into alignment so that they can be compared and added together.

[Chocoholic83]

Thank you both for clearing that up for me. So are the Maths and English of equal weighting in that case? So a lower raw score on one paper would be averaged out...

[streathammum]

The school should tell you how the papers are weighted as part of its admissions policy. So it might be that there are two papers and each paper is worth 50% of the marks. If there are three papers, it might be that each paper is worth a third of the marks or it might be that one is worth 50% and the other two are 25% each.

The raw scores for each exam are standardised separately.

Each test could have a different maximum raw score - say 60 for maths and 75 for English. You couldn't just add them together because that would give an advantage to candidates who were stronger in English than maths. The standardisation means that both the English and maths tests have the same "top" score (often 141) so you can add them together and compare results between the two exams.

[ToadMum]

Have a look here

https://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/forum ... SE#p471252

[Chocoholic83]

Thanks all. That link is very interesting and complicated in equal measure!