missed questions

[cherrypicker]

Schools may have results by 2nd December for comment. Many "friendly" teachers will give you the answer you want.
It is clearly a "corrupt" system.

No exam system should give the same paper on a different day.

The 11+ is a competition. Schools should not be involved.
If a child did badly, then that is tough, they lost the competiton.
The highest scores should win, else scrap the 11+ let teacher assements rule.

I favour an 11+ competition. Life is a competition. Accept it.
Children have less than a 25% chance of getting a place.

From feedback, parts of the 11+, this year, especially maths was so easy that a year 4 child could answer most of the questions. Now that is pathetic.

Then again, the 11+ is at the begining of year 6, so to be "fair" to non-tutored children it should ask up to the end of year 5, but at least stretch the children. May be this is what they did, and gave silly questions like 5 x 15.

May be that all children should be comprehensively tested at school at the end of year 5, and on the basis of these results places should be awarded. National SATS at year 5 at 11+ standard is required.
This way children who are "weak" that actually do well can benefit and be offered a place.
Increase the competition to include every child!

[moved]

May be that all children should be comprehensively tested at school at the end of year 5, and on the basis of these results places should be awarded. National SATS at year 5 at 11+ standard is required.
This was children who are "weak" that actually do well can benefit and be offered a place.
Increase the competition to include every child!

I have often thought that this would be a kinder system. Level 5s at the end of year 5 seem to be fairly standard for the applicants to our local grammars.

[Mr Benn]

What a great idea - takes away all the stress of the kids having to go to a strange school , and probably affecting a number of the kids performance.

But , of course, that would be too simple.

[DarkEnergy]

The newer and better proposal is that awarding levels in year 6 should be dropped altogether. Replace them with tests at the start of year 7. This avoids any tendency a school may have to adjust figures to make them look better. This would not affect 11plus.

[MoJo]

Did i miss something? How do we know the maths was so easythis year that a y4 child could answer it?

[DarkEnergy]

Trying to not give anything away... I have spoken to several children who sat the 11+ and all said it was easy. I smelled a rat and asked more detailed questions, it turns out that it was not so easy after all. Many have said they did not answer or guessed many questions. So I think we should just wait and see, but I think it was a fair test and probably equally as hard as in previous years.

[no_ball]

I also agree. An easy test is hard to believe, there was something else going on between the lines. Let's wait for the results in four months time

[Ed's mum]

Trying to not give anything away... I have spoken to several children who sat the 11+ and all said it was easy. I smelled a rat and asked more detailed questions, it turns out that it was not so easy after all. Many have said they did not answer or guessed many questions. So I think we should just wait and see, but I think it was a fair test and probably equally as hard as in previous years.

This was the situation last year too. There were more than a few children who said to my daughter that the test had been 'easy', whilst all my daughter could talk about was the sheer amount of questions that she had left out.
As you can imagine, we feared the worst.
In fact, those children who had found it easy were not successful in gaining a place at GS and, typically, those children who had focused on the amount of questions that were left out were those who were more used to being high flyers and being able to complete their work to a high standard within set times.

[mike1880]

There's said (by those with more experience than me) to be a similar tendency in the B'ham test. Children who are used to being top and doing well in tests find the CEM exam hard because they're not used to struggling for time. Only time will tell; it's not really worth thinking about too deeply before 1st March.

Mike

[Bad Dad]

From feedback, parts of the 11+, this year, especially maths was so easy that a year 4 child could answer most of the questions. Now that is pathetic.

Did i miss something? How do we know the maths was so easy this year that a y4 child could answer it?

My experience, for what it's worth...
Although I am not the most objective of judges, I think my son is extremely good at Maths. I am sure there are better kids out there but he hasn't come across one yet in his school career so far. My hope on the maths was that it was as hard and time-pressured as possible so he would have the best chance to differentiate himself and make up for probable low scores in VR and NVR, as he was always going to struggle with those (in particular, his spelling is terrible). When he came out of the test, I was disheartened initially because he also said the maths was quite easy (and surprise surprise, the VR and NVR were very hard). However, questioning him further he said he completed all the long maths except for one question which he left out and didn't have time to go back for. (I don't think he ever failed to finish a paper in the allotted time when we were doing practice, so there was obviously some time pressure in this exam.) I managed to get him to recall six of the long maths questions in reasonable detail, and they were not at all easy. A year 4 child would be going some to answer those. He said he did have time to answer all the short maths questions and go back and check a few afterwards, but when he described them for me, I also felt that these did not sound particularly easy either. No doubt there were some easy questions - all 11+ papers we used for practice had some of those, even the tough independent school ones that cherrypicker made reference to in another post. His description of the test was almost identical to my elder son 2 years ago (not in the actual content, but in terms of the level of difficulty, time pressure and how much he completed). I think my younger son is slightly better at maths than the elder, and the elder scored 132 (raw score 73% - which is lower than any maths practice paper he ever did) which probably put him in the top 10 on the maths. I just desperately hope the similarity of experience extends to second son getting a similar score and it will be enough to compensate for the other sections. So the results of grilling my children leads to the conclusion that I agree with the last few posters. It was probably no more nor less difficult this year than previous years. Maybe this year the test's fearsome reputation had built up so much that on the day it just wasn't quite the horrific experience they had been warned about.

Only time will tell; it's not really worth thinking about too deeply before 1st March.

This is great advice, but as you can tell from this post, I am not heeding it very successfully!