What marks in practice papers at this stage to get a place?

[Apple15]

Hi, I'm working through questions with my child and still not really getting very high marks. I was wondering for anyone who might still be around from the last couple of years who got into the school (WCHS), what was the range of scores your child was getting in mocks/test papers at home? I've heard people say you need 90+% at this stage to be sure of a place - is that your experience too?

Thanks - feeling stressed

[Blossom8]

What materials are you using? Woodford uses the CEM papers so we went through loads of the verbal and non verbal papers. My daughter has just finished her first year at Woodford but from memory, she was getting high percentages but not always 90% plus since she was weaker at non verbal reasoning.

[exam2019]

We are in the same situation. The difficulty of the materials means her scores change depending on which test we use. Bond tends to be easier and she gets over 80% which we think she has to get that/higher consistently. Other publishers she is down towards 70% which is too low. What are you using and what scores?

PS while writing have you got the ID slip to take to the test? Or does that get sent out to us at some point soon?

[Apple15]

We're mainly using CGP materials, the 10-min tests - for these, we're sometimes getting 60%, mostly 60-70%. Have used Bond before, but not the 10-11 stuff - should we get that too? I'm not sure there's enough time to fit in more books though!

We've also started doing some of the papers from Leap and CGP, and we're getting 70-75% on those. Party it's a time issue which we're trying to work on with the timed 10-min tests, but some of it is just vocab etc that she doesn't know.

We haven't had anything through yet from Redbridge, I've heard they don't send anything out until a couple of weeks before the test though?

[exam2019]

Hi

I think it is worth trying some full length papers or doing an exam centre mock (some companies are running them online this month) if you haven't tackled the whole thing. Stamina and timing definitely come into it and your DD will not be getting exposure to this part of the learning if she's only doing 10 minute tests. The timings of CEM mean that your DD needs to get used to the recorded announcements and that you can't go back and forth between sections during the test. It's all quite odd for them and not like other exams as it stops the children from playing to their strengths. They have to work through in the time slots and order given - very pressured.

You need to be practicing at the proper/harder level too - age 10-11 at least. If you buy FPTP books then you can log the results online and compare with other children who have logged their results to get an idea of where you might sit in the cohort. I saw that our local waterstones had buy one, get one half price on all 11+ materials as it is good to have a few different publishers to practice with, for variety and different difficulty/question types, even if you don't use all of the papers in the pack.

Good luck

[Blossom8]

We used Bonds but my daughter found them not very challenging so but we purchased papers from the Exam Papers Plus online which we found really beneficial as they have various categories from Antonyms to numerical reasoning etc

[Apple15]

Thanks everyone, yes I do have some full-length papers so we will crack on with those and look at some additional resources mentioned above. I think at this stage all we can do is try to focus on the weaker areas and hope it will be good enough.