11 Plus Exams Forum

This may seem a very silly question, but being out of county, there is no support from our local school so I feel a bit 'alone' in the build up to sitting the exam this year.
How do I gauge my sons scoring from the % he gets in practice papers?
Any advice gratefully received
Thanks.

Not a silly question at all, but sadly not an easy answer either!

Because scores for the real tests are standardised against the cohort taking the tests and also age standardised the actual marks required to pass by any child taking the tests in any one year may vary by several marks both within that year and from year to year.

A very rough guesstimate seems to be that a child needs to get around 75% or above in the actual papers. People usually reckon on a child dropping a few marks from what they were getting on the practice papers to the real thing to account for nerves etc. Also remember to use the timing required in the real tests as many of the practice tests use different timings and speed is an important element. In addition no Verbal Reasoning practice papers exactly mirror the question types used in Lincolnshire's test though the majority of them will be found in the "21 types" published by IPS.

Thank you Alex, thats really helpful.

We've been practising with Bond 10 min tests and as well as some of the Bond assessment papers. I've also just purchased a couple of the Susan Daughtrey books. I shall look out for the IPS you mention, but in the meantime, will the ones we already have echo what we would expect to find in the exam? Thanks in advance.

Bond contain some types that don't come up in Lincolnshire.

Have a look at the Lincolnshire page on the Schools section - it has a brief guide to which publishers produce practice papers which are relevant to Lincolnshire:

http://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/school ... re-11-plus" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

There is also a rather old thread where people have discussed which pratice papers they have found most helpful for both VR and NVR:

http://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/forum/ ... php?t=5540" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Hope this helps.

Yes, very helpful. Thanks so much (and thank goodness for this forum!)