SET standardisation for age

[phantomguzzler]

I agree that they are most likely trying to be as fair as possible but I think some tests are more sensitive to age differences than others and that tests involving vocabulary is one of them so I wonder if there are greater differences between the English scores of August vs English scores of September born children than there are for the maths tests. As someone in another post said children who are 10 years and 1 month are almost 10% younger than children 10 years and 11 months hence have they been exposed to 10% less vocab? Probably not that simple but I do wonder if English differences are going to be greater especially for boys. Maths is easier to teach because it is conceptual, teaching vocab is more subliminal I would say though exposure and growth. Hope that makes sense. I have a gut feeling there are more older boys in grammar schools, not just because there are more taking the tests but because the standardization process may not be fair. I would like to be proved wrong and wish more information was available from the schools.

[streathammum]

The whole point of standardisation for age is to correct for these issues. There will be an even spread of ages at grammar schools generally (there may be variations in individual schools in individual years) - otherwise the standardisation is not doing its job.

Yes summer borns have been exposed to less vocab by dint of being younger but they've had the same amount of formal teaching of vocab.

[Ladymuck]

Certainly the boys schools have a slightly different approach from one another, and they do make clear (from memory) that they standardise each paper separately and then aggregate, presumably for that very reason.