11 Plus Exams Forum

We all seem to have gone a bit blank here don't we?!

We need the equivalent of a Patricia, Okanagan, DAOgroupie etc here in the Kent forum.

Wonder if 11plus exams is going to do some mocks which fit the new and unique "Kent style" one-off for 2014? As we have no practice tests in school any more it seems like a good gap in the market to fill!

After this year, it would be you, Mystery

I've been wondering if I've done nothing with DS over half time because I feel a bit at sea after the announcement about some-sort-of-format and provider.

Time to get a grip so, all VR/NVR types I can get my hands on; worded maths problems and comprehension with grammar ... Or have I missed a trick?

fatbananas wrote:After this year, it would be you, Mystery

I second the nomination!

oh no.

We plan to not spend too much time on the NVR/VR until the next announcement in May but instead concentrate on Literacy and Math's.

KCC are very keen to keep control of the test and in order to do so they need to keep places like The Judd happy. The latest newsletter from The Judd said they will use the KCC test in 2014 but are keeping the possibility open of doing there own test the following year if the new test doesn't address their issues (which are a lack of literacy in the current test). So we expect a tough and comprehensive (no pun intended) literacy section in an attempt to keep The Judd on board.

The political pressure is all about making the test less open to tuition so on that score our feeling is they will play with the reasoning section (which has the most scope to be changed from year to year) to make it as different as possible from anything we've seen before, so frankly it could be anything! We're hoping that will become clearer in May, if not we'll just have to do all the Bond/GL/CEM stuff we can get our hands on and the poor children's brains will explode!


DaddyOh

Yes I'll be trying to cover as much variety as poss with my pupils. Keep on with the 15 VR types at least for now, include comprehension/CEM style literacy, make sure lots of numerical reasoning as well as the slightly more straightforward GL style maths. Bond for NVR. Then focus in once we have more info. Poor kids!

I think the literacy/maths paper is combined to allow for children who are strong in either subject to shine through. Just putting it out there

I was quite relaxed about the whole thing but since the announcement I feel like we have too much to do and not enough time.

frangipani wrote:I think the literacy/maths paper is combined to allow for children who are strong in either subject to shine through. Just putting it out there

I was quite relaxed about the whole thing but since the announcement I feel like we have too much to do and not enough time.

Yes, I'm with you, Frangipani, on all the above. Perhaps, so that DC needn't 'pass' one element and 'fail' another, but just pass the overall paper.

Although KCC want minimum tutoring, I think the ones who are most likely to be successful, particularly for the super-selectives, will be those who've been highly tutored also for private school exams.

That is a possibilit but we can't know. Just because they are in the same paper doesn't mean the marks have to be merged. The reason some things are merged is because kent asked in the bid documents for two papers only covering reasoning, numeracy and literacy.

It could be like the CEM test up here - this year, although they had three sections covering Numeracy/VR/NVR (all tested in lots of short sections of 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 15 minutes etc where you can't go back to a previous section if you have time left over), the results were a mean of the Numeracy and NVR combined and then added to the results for the VR. Hence all three areas were tested but the mathematical elements of numeracy and NVR accounted for 50% as did the VR. Previously, each of the three elements were given equal weighting which helped more numerical children.