11 Plus Exams Forum

Hello,

Do any experienced people out there have opinions as to the difficulties of the various papers? Do they increase in difficulty from 1 through to 8, or are there some real stinkers dotted about amongst the papers?

Do DC improve substantially? DS seems really good at some types and hopelessly appalling at others! Is it just practise?

Any experience/ encouragement would be welcome!

Having looked through the NVR thread, issues seem to be with papers 1, 5 and 8. Is that people's general experience? Are those harder? Should we do papers 2,3,4 and 6,7 first?

NVR is something that doesn't really come naturally to DS. His marks are respectable - usually - but I'd like them to be a bit more comfortable. I also don't want to knock his confidence by giving him a paper he really struggles with.

Any advice would be really helpful!

If he is interested in his score I would start with 2. If he doesn't take the score in practice as an indication of anything other than where more learning/practice is required, then just go for it.


We have done papers 1 to 5. So far lowest score on paper 1, have repeated it and still not getting same mark as on some others first time round. Paper 5 this weekend - 74 percent (rounded) and this was lower than papers 2, 3, 4. Timing may not be perfect as child does it with stopwatch. 6 mins per section. I ask her to write down what each section took. She has to guess and move on if she can see she is starting to exceed average of 30s per question. She records times. Some of her paper 5 times were closer to 7 than 6 mins so will be inflated. Also some lucky guesses.

I was struggling last night, after a glass of wine, to work out some of them myself.

I think those sound like very decent scores this distance from September, and timed as well. I gave DS paper 1 yesterday. I timed him, exactly 6 mins per section. He got 52%. When I got him to look at them again just now, he often could see his mistakes, which probably means his score would've been higher if he'd not rushed.

Don't know what to do next. Is it just practise, getting used at what to look for, and doing it more quickly; getting used to the different things they are looking for?

That was a good score. We have done paper 1 twice timed now and it both times fell well short of scores on papers 2 to 6 where dc gets scores in 70s and 80s. I have no idea if these score hold any significance or not but I am hoping that going through corrections and then repeating the lower scoring sections from time to time is a worthwhile exercise which will pay off in the real thing.

guys - I need some mental support here. My DS is being prepared for Tiffin Boys. He scores well in the VR tests by bond and the papers his tuition centre give him. However, the NVR is not so strong. Just gave him the CGP tests this morning for NVR and he scored around 75%. Should I panic? Should he not be in the 85-90% range by now, especially if his exam is in October?

Any advice, resources you think will help him will be useful.

Thanks in advance.

Ps- I'm not panicking in front of him as I need to instill him with confidence

You might already be doing/ done these but i thought its worth commenting.
It's worth it to spend a couple of days going through the techniques using the parents guide from Bonds. There are examples of different types and what to look out for while spotting similarities or differences. Follow this up with papers without timing to instill confidence. Once they know what to look out for, the answers seem obvious and they seem to complete the papers on time. We did timed papers in August and DC was consistently scoring over 90% that we started to work on other subjects and didn't do any NVR after the second week. It's also important to go through the incorrect answers at the end of every paper before attempting a new one.

Thank you for your reply ptolomy. We have been doing those things thank you - but not through the bonds.. I'll look into getting the bond guide now.

Can I just ask if 90% is the figure we should be aiming for if he is to get into tiffin. I know there is no pass mark as such, but what is the safest lowest % he should be getting in order to get in? I wont obviously tell him but I need to know what you think so I know if he is tiffin material.

With NVR I would look at his approach to questions. Sometimes they try to spot it in one go. The key is to systematically eliminate what it cant be by focussing on one thing at a time, it normally will get you down to the final 2 and then you should be able to spot the final thing. If you try and do in one go you may get the wrong one. DS's scores could go from 95% to 65% in the space of days, so I sat down with him and watched him and straight away I knew he was falling in the trap, as soon as he went back to the right approach his scores were up and he got 93% on the day. It wasn't the Tiffins test but I have read on here over the years of similar problems from DC's and NVR.

Hi viv,
Both my children are at the Tiffin schools and they both preferred verbal to non-verbal reasoning when they were preparing for the exam. My DD in particular used to get quite confused by the non-verbal as the tutor had gone through various types and techniques with her and she would spend ages trying to work out which type it was and try to follow a specific rule for each one. I eventually got fed up with this systematic approach and just said to her: have an open mind, relax and use your brain... and suddenly her scores went right up as she started to think laterally. It may be worth trying! As regards scores for Tiffin, I would agree that you should be aiming for around 90% for each paper by the time of the exam. Do you have any mock tests planned? do pm me if you want to. Regards Peridot