11 Plus Exams Forum

Great visualisations & should be immensely helpful for parents and boys preparing for future QE admissions. Great work.

My DS took last year's exams and will start this Sep. It was a surprise to see they'd increased the English number of questions but kept Maths the same. My limited experience is the Maths is ultra competitive (you need to be easily achieving almost max raw scores on the sample papers along with the ones from GL) and the English is extremely difficult to finish in the time allocated.

I would not be surprised if quite a few candidates achieved max raw scores in Maths. My DS finished his Maths paper 20 mins early and was confident he'd achieved max but I know he likely made 1-2 silly mistakes - he also mentioned that there was at least another 10 students who finished early looking supremely confident.

English was a different story. DS just finished but rushed thru the last 5-7 questions and he thought that most of the other candidates failed to finish the English paper. Surprisingly, he achieved a slightly higher in English than Maths despite thinking he'd aced the Maths.

11 students sitting there doing nothing in an exam supremely confident they had aced it????

55 students did score 141 in Maths but I bet they were not the ones sitting there doing nothing for 20 minutes, they would have been the ones doing inverse operations on all of their answers and checking and rechecking for the whole of the allocated time.

5 students scored 141 in English. DG

Daogroupie wrote:11 students sitting there doing nothing in an exam supremely confident they had aced it????

Yes, these are 10 yr old boys we're referring too.... actually many grown adults also act like this. Are you surprised that there are 10 year old boys who take exams and come out feeling confident they aced it even though their actual results is closer to average?

daddyshah wrote:Great visualisations & should be immensely helpful for parents and boys preparing for future QE admissions. Great work.

Thanks a lot daddyshah for your kind words

Pl1688 wrote:My DS took last year's exams and will start this Sep. It was a surprise to see they'd increased the English number of questions but kept Maths the same. My limited experience is the Maths is ultra competitive (you need to be easily achieving almost max raw scores on the sample papers along with the ones from GL) and the English is extremely difficult to finish in the time allocated.

I would not be surprised if quite a few candidates achieved max raw scores in Maths. My DS finished his Maths paper 20 mins early and was confident he'd achieved max but I know he likely made 1-2 silly mistakes - he also mentioned that there was at least another 10 students who finished early looking supremely confident.

English was a different story. DS just finished but rushed thru the last 5-7 questions and he thought that most of the other candidates failed to finish the English paper. Surprisingly, he achieved a slightly higher in English than Maths despite thinking he'd aced the Maths.

WoW Pl1688,

Thank you very much for posting your son's first hand experiences! It is very helpful! And congratulate to you and your son!
It seems QE's Maths test may be on the easy side comparing to the candidates' capability while English test is used as the "differentiator". Would you like to share what kind of Maths/English materials did you use for preparation and comment on the level of difficulty those materials comparing the actual tests?

I have gathered those commonly available prepartion materials from e.g. Bond/Schofield & Sims/CGP 11+/First-Pass-the-Post/ 11+ Year 5-7 practice papers from AE. Would you like to comment on the level of difficulty?

I have also gather some private school previous papers. But I think the format are quite different from QE tests. Those English papers typically require writing long answer instead of multiple choice questions and Maths papers can be quite challenging. What is your view on using those materials for QE test prepartion?

Your comments and suggestions are very much appreciated.

For exam practice, we used all the various multiple choice papers. AE was the closest in style and difficulty to the GL papers. First past the post can be a little trickier on the English. For the practice papers, I usually challenged my DS to finish them in less time than stipulated (i.e. 40 mins for a 50 min paper) whilst still aiming to achieve 90% which was good prep for the unexpected increase in questions for the English paper.

As we also entered him for a private school, he also did all the private school Maths and English. The private school Eng papers were good prep for the QE exam despite being a different format as it meant he had to really think about them in order to answer the questions. We also had a 1mth subscription to Atom in prep for the ISEB tests.

This may sound like a lot of prep, but our DS isn't one of those gifted/naturally bright/top table kids and hence he had make up for that with hard work. Yes he may well struggle over next 5 yrs and yes he may well get culled prior to sixth form - he is aware of this to the extent a 10 year can comprehend such matter.

bull_r: given you've gone thru all the trouble compiling those stats, I'm sure your DS will end up very well prepared!

Pl1688 wrote:For exam practice, we used all the various multiple choice papers. AE was the closest in style and difficulty to the GL papers. First past the post can be a little trickier on the English. For the practice papers, I usually challenged my DS to finish them in less time than stipulated (i.e. 40 mins for a 50 min paper) whilst still aiming to achieve 90% which was good prep for the unexpected increase in questions for the English paper.

As we also entered him for a private school, he also did all the private school Maths and English. The private school Eng papers were good prep for the QE exam despite being a different format as it meant he had to really think about them in order to answer the questions. We also had a 1mth subscription to Atom in prep for the ISEB tests.

This may sound like a lot of prep, but our DS isn't one of those gifted/naturally bright/top table kids and hence he had make up for that with hard work. Yes he may well struggle over next 5 yrs and yes he may well get culled prior to sixth form - he is aware of this to the extent a 10 year can comprehend such matter.

bull_r: given you've gone thru all the trouble compiling those stats, I'm sure your DS will end up very well prepared!

Pl1688,

Thank you very much for your detailed sharing of the preparation materials and experiences! This is really valuable insights indeed! I really appreaciate your great advise!
I will get Atom Learning. Trying to finish tests with less time while maintaining accuracy is very hard but I guess that's a really good way for practice.

Can I please ask what publisher is AE? is it an acronym?

Many thanks

jazbaati99 wrote:Can I please ask what publisher is AE? is it an acronym?

Many thanks

Hi jazbaati99,

AE is a Publisher ‏ : ‎ Accelerated Education Publications Ltd.
You can search "11+ Maths Year 5-7 Testpack A Papers 9-12: Numerical Reasoning GL Assessment Style Practice Papers" in Amazon. There are a several test packs available.