Confused

[mum of five]

hi, just a little confused still on the standarising[not sure if i spelt that correctly] pls could someone explain a little more on it . i have now been told basically that if i my son even got all the answers right on eleven plus will it stiill be standarised? or if he got 69/70 and then it got standarised down and they took a few marks off he wouldnt pass, even though he got the right amount for a dec child? seems really confusing please please someone axplain this to me as ive been told even if the child does really well he could still not pass ,makes me think what is the point and how is it fair..am very confused

[bucks mum1]

A September born child usually requires 70/71 out of 80 to achieve 121.

If your son is December born and scores 69/70 out of 80 he should secure a score of at least 121. Over the past few year people have requested their childs score and historically 69 would be sufficient.

No one can give a guarantee because it depends on the difficulty of the paper/ability of the cohort.

[Tree]

Hi mum of five i shall try to explain standardising as i see it although there are a few things specific to bucks that i'm not sure about;

1) the raw scores (ie the score out of 80) for all the children born in the same month are analysed seperatly. The average score is calculated and then the standard deviation is worked out (the standard deviation is a measure of the spread of scores so if all the children got scores in a narrow range eg between 55 and 65 with an average of 60 the standard deviation would be small around 3 or 4 but if the spread of scores was wider say between 40 to 80 with the same average of 60 the standar deviation would be wider around 10-15.)

2) the standardised score for each birth month is then created this involves setting the mean score to a set standardised score this is traditionally 100 so this means if you get the mean score out of all the scores for the children with the same birth month as you you would get 100 as your standarised score. If you get a raw score different from the mean score then this difference is converted to a fraction of the standard deviation of the raw scores for your birth month cohort eg if you got 65 and the mean score was 60 and the standard deviation was 5 then you would have 5/5 or 1 standard deviation more than the average and if you got 70 you would be 10 marks above the average or 10/5 or 2 standard deviations above the mean score. For each standard deviations you are away from the mean you then get 15 standardised marks so if you are 1 standard deviation from the mean you get 100 + 15 or 115 as your score and if you are 2 standard deviations above the mean then you get 100 + 15X2 or 130 as your standardised score. (bucks then do some shifting of results and the mean score for the bucks kids is around 110 i think but this is the bit i'm not so sure about)

3) So your standardised score depends on 3 things the first is your raw score the second is the mean raw score of the children in your birth month and the third is the spread of results (standard deviation) of the children in your birth month. So theoretically it is correct that if you happened to be born in a month where all the other children born the same month were freeky geniuses and all got 80/80 then yes you would fail with a 79/80 however interestingly if you look at the results that are availabe from past years relating to the actual raw vs standardised scores they are remarkably consistent year on year for each birth month with the pass mark of 121 being around 66/67 for aug born and 71/2 for sept born and equally spced in between with dec being around 69/70

hope this helps

[pmmum]

I may be misunderstanding here but does that mean if my august born dd got 72 but a lot of august children got 73+ and her friend born in Feb got 70 but the marks for Feb were lower that her friend would pass with a lower score and my daughter who is 6months younger wouldn't? I know this scenario is unlikely.

This would then lead to the conclusion that for grammar school children the number of children with birthdays in any given month is equal across all months. Also in this case would the liklihood of passing for a specific month be affected by the number of children with birthdays in that month.

[mitasol]

I don't think you've misunderstood at all.

http://www.nfer.ac.uk/nfer/research/ass ... sation.cfm

Nfer use a complex formula to calculate the age standardised score but state the following

the effect is similar to computing sets of scores using the above equation for pupils of the same age (to the nearest month).

Nfer also state

An important consequence of this is that, in whatever month pupils were born, roughly the same proportion will achieve the specified pass mark.

[Tree]

Nice link mitasol so when i have tried to model the results i have used the equation quoted in this link with a simple average score offset and for the 50 or so results i have modelled interestingly the progression of increasing raw score marks per month older seems consistent and so the problems of being born in a month with a load of midwich cookoo type peers does not seem to happen in practice.

pmmum the number of children born in each month will vary as per the national trend i should think and all depends on the feel good factor of the 9th month before i suppose. But the number of children in each month should not affect the average score for that month satistically anyway.

[mum of five]

thanku for all the info,still a little confused ...... but thats prob just me ,nyway good luck to every one whos dc,s have sat the exams.

[Sally-Anne]

hi, just a little confused still on the standarising[not sure if i spelt that correctly] pls could someone explain a little more on it . i have now been told basically that if i my son even got all the answers right on eleven plus will it stiill be standarised? or if he got 69/70 and then it got standarised down and they took a few marks off he wouldnt pass, even though he got the right amount for a dec child? seems really confusing please please someone axplain this to me as ive been told even if the child does really well he could still not pass ,makes me think what is the point and how is it fair..am very confused

All the contributions above are valuable, but I am going to try to do the "words of one syllable" explanation that I looked for once upon a time, and you are looking for now.

If your son is born in September and scores 70/80 (rough scores) he could pass and get 121. If his birthday is in August and he scores 67/80 he could also get a score of 121 and pass.

They are very rough numbers, but there are around 3-4 marks between Sep and Aug.

S-A