11 Plus Exams Forum

We would be grateful if someone can answer the CCHS CEM Exam questions below:

1. Can children take spare paper for maths working out in CCHS CEM Exam? Are they entitled to ask for some spare paper when they get into her allocated exam room?

2. Is watch allowed during CCHS CEM Exam for time management purposes?

3. Are children allowed to take any water bottle or light snacks?

1) No, they cannot bring their own paper. There should be enough working space provided in the CEM exam paper for each question. This is a really time pressured test. The less clutter on the table the better.

2) Girls may wear a watch - analogue or simple digital (not calculator watches, Apple watches, fitbits etc).

3) You will be advised of this when you get details of your DD's sitting.

We are really grateful for your response.

Would it be better to wear or not to wear watch (analogue or simple digital) for CEM Exam time management?

If children wear watch - is that likely to put children under extra pressure/stress?

Apologies, we are new to CEM Exam.

Would there be enough working space on the Question Booklet or on the Answer Sheet?

The test is so time pressured. Personally, I would not bother with a watch and let your DD concentrate on completing as much of the test as possible. With some sections only 3 minutes long, time is wasted checking a watch. It is a distraction for students and the exam hall/classroom will have a clock.

Good luck to your DD.

I specifically asked CCHS about watches last year. watches with stopwatch functionality are not allowed. As all have mentioned, the main challenge with CEM tests is time pressure. You should be getting your dd to do several practice papers under actual time constraints. By doing this, they will judge how long they should be spending on per question. They also need to learn to leave questions and move on to the next if its taking too long. You do not need to answer all the questions to get a high score. If you leave out a question, mark something on the answer paper, otherwise you might get out of synch. Also make a mark somewhere to identify to yourself that you guessed at this. When your dd first does these papers, they will run out of time. Use stopwatches at this point to give them a sense of time elapsed. Work quickly but dont rush! Better to bide your time, answering say 70% of the questions that you know the answers to, than rushing to answer 100%, and making mistakes with say 40% of the questions. With my dd last year, she got through about 75% of some sections at the start of doing practice papers. By the end and in the actual test, she was working well ahead of time, and finished many sections very early, so you might say she was working too fast. She didnt answer all the questions, skipping the ones which were either taking too long, or ones she deemed looked too hard, and got a very good score. The conclusion I take from this is its better to securely answer the easy questions/the ones you know, than rush and try to answer everything. I knew one parent who was very happy that her dd had been able to answer all of the questions in the actual test, only to be disappointed when said dd was short of the entry score.
PS the invigilators do tell you verbally of the time remaining i.e 1 mins to go.