Anyone do a mock in gloucester today?

[Stressed?Moi?]

Oh my goodness, we have just had the results in and seen the paper.

English was hard but fine as expected.

Maths!
We have been following the CGP books and I was confident that if she could do everything in those books she would be fine.
But the stuff in this test was sooo hard.
If she needs this, then we have a massive job to teach it all to confidence level before September.
Her maths is good (level 4a at end of year 4) and she has a good teacher this year, and we have already come across lots of things that she hasn't yet done in school which we have had to learn (eg mode, median and mean), but wow.
Loads of percentages, and difficult ones, not straight forward. Square roots (one question was what is square root of 361, I don't even know how to calculate that ), algebra, again, hard level.

feel a bit over whelmed.
ds did it when is was VR. He didn't do any of this. I cannot see how this a fairer test. It just tests if you have been taught it.

She did very badly, not going to tell her the results. But it was mainly that she only did half of the questions. the ones she did she got right, which is a good thing.

I really wouldn't worry steppemum. As I said, my ds bombed the first mock I think he was something like 173 out of 179!) and I was so worried. Here is a link to my posting at the time:

http://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/forum/ ... 16&t=37616" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It was all good in the end but it did cause a few sleepless nights. Stay calm and treat it as an exercise to pinpoint weaker areas (better to find out now).

Above all, remember that if she is finding it hard (and is getting good results) so would everyone else on the day. She was "up against" a cross section of a small sample of kids, some of whom are possibly being tutored to within an inch of their lives whereas on the day it may be that there are kids who aren't, so she would have an advantage (sorry to sound blunt everyone), so keep on doing what you are doing. Concentrate on the strengths to make sure she aces those and work on the weaker ones to use as bankers. The common feeling is that the test isn't designed to be finished so she shouldn't feel too badly if she just ran out of time. You can work on that too. From what I remember ds found the non-VR a bit tricky, so if she is weaker, it may be worth looking at technique literature.

Very worse case scenario and the test doesn't go as you hope (which I'm sure it will) she will be having a head start for the first year at senior school

For what it's worth, dd did hers a couple of years ago with the VR exam as well and I have to say that even though CEM has been a nightmare, I personally think it is a fairer test of ability than just learning the 21 question types.

Stay calm and positive and I'm sure you will be fine.

[steppemum]

Thanks stressed.

I agree with you that this test is more related to school, and actually has the benefit of helping them educationally which the VR didn't, but it does feel that this test requires massive amounts of trained tutoring, where the VR was quite easy to DIY.

Dh is going to do maths with her I think!

[DebsB]

Don't panic! DD said last Sept that the maths in the real test was much easier than the CGP maths, whereas the real test English was about the same difficulty as the CGP English.

[steppemum]

That's very encouraging Debs, the maths in the mock was much harder than the CGP book, she is pretty confident with everything in that book, so if it is that level she will be fine.