What if there is more than one right answer?

Advice on 11 Plus VR papers and problems

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edmontonkitty
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Jun 04, 2015 4:59 pm

What if there is more than one right answer?

Post by edmontonkitty »

For example, I have just downloaded the MW Educational Verbal Reasoning Practice Test via the link on this site and some of the questions have multiple possible answers in addition to the one given as the "correct" answer. For example: a letter which ends the first word CA and starts the second word OW the answer given is N which obviously works but so do B, D (admittedly mostly if you're Scottish, but "dow" is in the dictionary so is correct), M, P, R, T, W and Y. Some of these are uncommon but I would expect the average 10-year old to know car/row!
And that's not the only problem with MW Educational: The next question is LIM ( ) AR - they give the "correct" answer as B but why not E? Another question WE ( ) ASK - they say T but why not B?
So does it matter? Is this just a badly designed test and "real" 11+ tests would not have this problem? Do tests mostly have only one answer or do they allow all possible answers?
Sally-Anne
Posts: 9235
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 8:10 pm
Location: Buckinghamshire

Re: What if there is more than one right answer?

Post by Sally-Anne »

edmontonkitty wrote:So does it matter? Is this just a badly designed test and "real" 11+ tests would not have this problem? Do tests mostly have only one answer or do they allow all possible answers?
Assuming the test is multiple choice, are there are duplicate answers possible from the answer sheet? There may be many possible endings/beginnings to the pair of words, but if there is only one possibility from the options given on the answer sheet, then that is the correct answer.

Otherwise, in order:

a) No, it doesn't matter.
b) Yes, there are errors in some published papers and no, the real tests wouldn't have these problems.
c) Yes, there's only one correct answer in the real tests.
Daogroupie
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Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2009 3:01 pm
Location: Herts

Re: What if there is more than one right answer?

Post by Daogroupie »

EdmontonKitty, welcome to the forum. I assume that you are sitting Latymer in which case you will be doing CEM so best to use the CEM material not the old VR material as at least half of the paper will be Mathematical VR which is not part of CEM.

Most of the publishers include more than one right answer if there is one. I am surprised to have there are so many mistakes in the MW download. I have bought their full papers and not found such problems.

Are you sitting in September? DG
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