11 Plus Exams Forum

My tutor called me today saying she had heard in the "tutors gossip" how several people had obtained moray house vr papers, and had found the vr paper exceptionally easy!!!
This is simple cheating in my opinion.
Why doesnt DAO do what st.michaels and warwickshire have done and stop using moray house?? I simply can not understand their thinking. It doesnt matter how many vr papers my son does he cant compete with children who have practised on the exact paper.
This whole system seems very unfair.

daofan wrote:My tutor called me today saying she had heard in the "tutors gossip" how several people had obtained moray house vr papers, and had found the vr paper exceptionally easy!!!
This is simple cheating in my opinion.
Why doesnt DAO do what st.michaels and warwickshire have done and stop using moray house??

They (and the consortium) are waiting until what happened to St Michael's (see this thread) and Warwickshire (see this thread) happens to them.

Daofan, a large percentage of posters on here who already have a dc who got into a selective school by exam managed to get them there by sitting a Moray House paper, DAO, Clement Danes, Parimeters, Queens, Watford Girls, Watford Boys, Rickys and Bushey. I will agree that if a candidate was able to do the exact same paper the day before they would be at a very great advantage. Is your tutor saying that this happened or just a Moray House paper? If it was just a MH paper then both my dd's sat a DAO Moray House paper and then two weeks later sat another one for St Clement Danes. They did not think that they got any advantage from that. There are posters on here who got full marks this year for DAO VR and are of course far too modest to talk about it. I know they did not see a Moray House before sitting DAO. If your ds practises Athey and Walsh and Bright Sparks he will be in a great position to do well. Please dont lose heart. If their parents have got hold of Moray papers it will give them false confidence and they may end up losing out over it. I know three families this year who were told by the school, friends and tutors that they would walk it and they are not even on the waiting list. Then there are posters on here who worked hard and worried harder and they have places. You have started early, focused well and have every reason to be cautiously optimistic. DG

I understand that the problem in warwickshire was that there were only 12 papers which just got used in rotation by the LEA and that some tutors had obtained a full set!
So it was not just the TYPE of paper that children had seen before but the ACTUAL papers.
Hence the furore in the press and consequent reluctant action from the LEA.

daofan wrote:It doesnt matter how many vr papers my son does he cant compete with children who have practised on the exact paper.

He can! I too had concerns when I came across the Moray-House-Paper-Issue but soon realised that there is nothing I can do about it other than follow so many posters' advice to practice a variety of papers. In the end, my ds also found the DAO VR test straight forward. I think the timing is the key rather than the difficulty of the questions. I had saved some of the Athey papers to the end to do them in 45 (rather than 50 minutes) to get an idea about the timing for the 100 questions.

Thank you