Sorry if this has been asked before. With over 2000 children sitting the test this year there must have been groups of children who had exactly the same scores. How do they rank them in this case? By age? Distance from school?

will depend on the oversubscription policy for the school.
I'll have a look

ETA - this is from Pate's :

It's a bit of a multistage process:

When the paper are marked CEM will do some weighting based on age to try and remove any bias in favour of older children - it's not clear if they do any other adjustments to take account of any sections of the papers that have shown to be either "too easy" or "too hard" - or potentially to remove questions that ended up with errors in either the question or the space allowed on the answer sheed (NOTE: Before anyone asks - I'm not aware of any errors on the Gloucester paper this year; as opposed to Buckingham where I think there was a mismatch between the question and answer sheets).

It's not clear what CEM actually do, and various attempts to get them to disclose the actual process over the years haven't got anywhere - partly because they are probably worried it would allow parents to construct appeals to take advantage of how the marks are processed.

Most schools then just allocate a ranking based on the overall mark a child has scored using the set of children that have applied to that particular school - with an overall "pass mark" being used as an ultimate cut off with the list potentially being cut off further up if there are deemed to be too many that have reached tht pass mark (but they may just be the same point). The fact that a lot of people share with all the schools usually means the rankings for each are usually fairly well aligned.

The exception to that is Pates who also apply a need to have a "pass mark" in each of the main 3 sections (Maths, NVR and English) - that means you can have a lower overall mark but a better ranking from Pates - it's not clear how many that affects comared to an overall top to bottom list, and I don't think enough people have posted detailed results that might enable that to be worked out (partly as you can't really compare like with like as not everyone shares with Pates and the only comparable list might be Crypt as it's the only other co-ed).

I suspect you can have multiple children on the same ranking point at this stage - but you wouldn't be able to tell unless everyone put their rankings on here and then the "gaps" would be evident (e.g. 3 tied at 150 would result in the next quoted rank being 153 etc - and in fact given the numbers applying it may be more than that on a given ranking point, unless the CEM marking processing results in non-integer marks, in which case you may be separated by only 0.1 etc.

I do wonder given the numbers involved whether it would be possible to have quite a few on one mark (and hence place) at this stage.

They then wait until everyone has applied via the CAF and if more than 1 person at around the 150th place has the same score (it's "around 150th" as of course several may be tied at a place just below 150th and take the count past that point). That separation is usually done using distance - though I'd need to check the actual admissions criteria for each school to see if any of them are using any other metric. If there is still a tie a that point (i.e. 2 or more also at exactly the same distance) it may get split by a random choice. There is also a chance the school will opt to go over PAN and admit those tied at 150th.

As it stands, at the moment, you probably can't tell if you are tied with anyone for a specific school - but it may not matter as they may choose somewhere else.

Do you mean that there will be several children all with the same rank?

I think that's possible - unless the CEM marking adjustment for age (and any other "normalisation") results in fractions in the final marks - otherwise you are stuck with integers as all the questions would either be just "right" or "wrong".

The fact that the admissions criteria for the schools talks about "separating those with the same mark" seems to confirm that you can have more than one child with the same mark - and hence the same ranking - at this stage because distance doesn't seem to apply until they need to do a final separation.

Warwickshire is CEM and you certainly have a number of children on an equal score/equal rank - which is why you sometimes see comments like 'not all children on score 230 have been offered".... The usual split at that point is distance from school but it can depend on each school but will be clearly written in their admissions policies.

I'm pretty sure there is an age adjustment in Glos so this will turn the raw scores which would be whole numbers into lots of fractions of numbers and therefore make any ties very rare.

I would imagine with the age adjustments and the fact they use rankings rather than scores you are less likely to get people exactly the same

I've read previously on this forum that the age standardisation goes to at least 2 digits after the decimal point (it might even be more, I can't remember) so it's unusual to have 2 children on the same score.
Has anyone else put their CAF in yet or are people still deciding? I'm starting to get excited now for DS. He's moved on already though - it's a long time until anything else happens!

Not put the CAF in yet, but have filled it in ready to submit. Waiting for the Ribston opening evening to ensure that it's definitely 1st choice.