SW London Girls' Private & Grammar - applying for year 7 in 2023

@1forward2back I know you asked to be updated if we heard on the LEH head. They've just announced it is Rowena Cole, think she was at St John's previously. Starting Sept 23. x

@confu5ed we had it Saturday!

Thanks, yes, I agree....probably best not to overthink it! But I am glad I asked around and now I have told my dd not to guess at the end for adaptive tests. Accuracy is best and not to worry if she still has questions to go at the end. We have the London Consortium coming up, which is adaptive. And we have Emanuel, which is written.

@Daydreamscometrue thank you! Have you got it too? Good luck if so and to everyone else sitting today x

Good luck to those sitting Ibstock today! @confu5ed and any others

SPG: spelling, punctuation, grammar
I do agree with @swgeek however that you can drive yourself mad over this and that you won’t change anything by trying to guess performance or anticipate results - difficult though it is not to!

@swgeek - that is so useful to know. Many thanks for your swift and helpful reply.

@QuiteAJourney it is true that your current school does not get them but if your child is rejected by a school they have applied to, you can ask the senior school for feedback and depending on the school, they might share the ISEB results broken down by section with you.

@swgeek , I agree that we should not read too much into our DC's accounts (at least, I do not on the back of my DD's).
Just out of curiosity, how did you find out about your DD's ISEB scores? I was told by our primary that they do not get to see them (but would love to).

I would really discourage anyone to try and read anything into how your child did based on their accounts of how the online exam went. Just try to distract yourself as much as possible, watch football, have a glass of wine, meet friends and wait for the results. Anything else is going to drive you crazy.

For what it's worth, my daughter (who luckily did her 11+ last year) said in her ISEB Maths she had tons of tough algebra and ratio questions which made us hopeful but somehow it turned out Maths was her weakest score in the end and in English which she found very hard from the outset she did surprisingly well. She found WHS super easy but then didn't get into the second round. She found the KGS Maths very hard, didn't finish and ended up getting an offer. And on and on, you just won't know anything until you get the results on paper.

@readingcat apologies, what do you mean SPG questions? I assume you mean the exam questions for Putney? I will ask her today more about the English to see.

@SamPoodle123 you can get a rough handle on the difficulty level of the English if you ask her about the SPG questions - the more complex the spellings or grammatical categories she was asked about, the higher the level. Same for word meanings or literary technique identification in the English comprehension.

@readingcat I have a feeling it is the same for PHS, as the test is adaptive. My dd finished the English early, so I assume for English she must not have gotten to the super tricky questions. I wish they would let us know the results in the end, even if they do not get in. I would like to have feedback on how she did in the actual exams.

^ This is responding to @SamPoodle123 asking about the ISEB kids who finished excessively quickly, not to the comments on the PHS cohort.

@SamPoodle123 yes, my understanding is that the kids who got booted off very quickly had not progressed beyond the entry level questions. That is to say, their hit rate on the easiest questions was not sufficiently high or consistent to enable them to progress to the next level question and that therefore the algorithm determined their result accordingly and ended the test. Those who stayed on a bit longer, but still finished with a fair amount of time left, may have managed enough of the entry level questions to move onto the next level, but then been beaten back by the increased difficulty. However, the whole adaptive testing process has been very opaque, so this is just my interpretation.

Thanks, I just hope Atom knows what they are doing and the scores will reflect the child's ability. It seems unfair when you just do not know if there is a fault with the program.

Also, from his knowledge, nobody experienced the tricky questions or sudden ending of the tests as above.

My son sat the ISEB in his prep last week. Everyone from the top to bottom sets considers the tests easy, and easily finished these within the time limit, with some having quite some time to spare. The questions are not getting harder as an adaptive test should be. It is only a mildly selective prep with a wide range of abilities. Also, he thinks many of the questions are the same as others.

This seems odd. The final ISEB score is not determined by the ability to do difficult questions, but rather by the ability to weed out careless mistakes in the easy ones?

She just meant tricky problems that take time to get through. After, reading the responses, I have decided to just let it go and wait and see what happens. But it is good to hear of feedback from others. I will also tell my dd not to rush through at the end of the consortium.

That is interesting to know. So I will make sure my dd understands that just because she sees there are more questions left at the end, do not rush through, because she could very well be at her last question and the others go away.

@Claphamrise @QuiteAJourney my so had the same experience. Has quite a number of questions left and was rushing though to finish then suddenly the test was over and other questions disappeared. No idea if this is good, bad or of not consequence though!

My DD had a somewhat similar experience - on one of the tests she thought she had 4 questions left (or so showed the bar) so rushed answering the one she was at. That was, in fact, the last one! She is adamant that she did not get it wrong and that it showed 4 questions left that suddenly disappeared. Sounds similar to what your son experienced.
The more I hear about this adaptive tests (be it ISEB or Atom), the more I am convinced that nothing beats your 'traditional' paper exam, with same questions for everybody and just a range of difficulty to cater for different abilities.

Does anyone have further info on the ISEBs timing out? DC said one of his subjects finished much earlier than the others and though he thought there were more questions to come (by looking at the progress bar), the test ended abruptly. I imagine it's because ISEB have gathered all the data they need at that point but it also means less time/opportunity to show what you can do

Nobody knows what is the algorythm behind Atom and how score are calculated, so I doubt you will the answer to your question. What does your daughter mean by long word problem? can she remember an example. If she found them hard then probably she was doing well.

What I do not understand though, if children who are strong in math kept getting easy math questions on Putney, wouldn't they be getting those correct and moving to the next level? Or do you think there is a fault in the system, and they are just being kept at the same level even if getting them correct?

I am worried because my dd said it started out easy and then she got so many long word problems that take forever to answer so she ran out of time in the end and guessed on a few in the last minute. This concerns me that this will mess up her score. But, I assume, this would be a natural tendency for some to suddenly panic at the end if they have questions left and only one minute left. I am really worried she did this and it might have messed up her results.