Urgent calling all teachers!!

[charlize]

My ds finally had his entrance exam 11 plus on Monday. He is confident that he has 100% in his maths and feels he has above 90% easily in his VR. His compehension was very good also.
The problem is his English essay. He was given 45 mins to write this, he had a choice of topics but the one he chose was. Describe your experience of being in a busy airport
Now My ds wrote a page of A4 about being at te airport and loads of things going wrong etc . Then he wrote 2 sides of A4 all about the flippin holiday when he got there!
Now he has told me what he has written about this holiday and I have to say It is brilliant, he has used lots of similies and talked about his feeling etc BUT has he totally missed the point??
Will he get marked down for waffling on about the holiday OR will they not care and admire his imagination??
HELP!

Btw They normally expect them to write about one side of A$ so he has written over the odds at 3 sides!

Depends on who marks it I would say. If they set the paper to see who would read the question and answer it concisely, then it probably would matter. On the other hand, at 11 plus, they want to find out about your son. It's not like a GCSE, they want to find out whether they want him or not. In which case, if he wrote a good essay, then I would hope it would stand him in good stead.

On the other hand, you could get a real stickler of a marker who takes the line that he should have answered the question more concisely.

Good luck! I'd have thought in 45 mins, a page of A4 would have been as much as some children would write anyway!

Crossed posts there!

Hi musica. Do you think setting a question and seeing who can answer it correctly is more likely on the comprehension paper? On the info sheet we were given before the exam it says:

Essay: we shall be looking for,fluency of expression, liveliness of ideas and breadth of vocab and mechanical accuracy, ie full stops spelling punctuation and paragraphing.

Do you think it won't matter that ds has gone off topic? as it doesn't actually state that they are looking for that?

For the comrehension they are looking for: the ability to understand straightforward meaning and the ability to select material that is relevant to the question set. So according to this they are not looking for relevance to the topic in the essay???
Am I right or am I grasping at straws?

charlize, I would think that if you get an intelligent teacher marking it, they will see what your son is capable of. If you're trying to differentiate between pupils, which is the object of an entrance exam, they're looking for the brighter kids, not necessarily the ones that gave the most 'technically' correct answer.

I think you'll just need to wait and see. I wouldn't despair though. Especially at 11, when they haven't had loads of exam practice, or been trained to pass exams. Sounds like your son did fine to me!

Charlize, I had a question in my finals at Oxford about the Byzantine Empire, about which I knew nothing, so I wrote an essay about the Ottoman Empire, about which I knew loads. I got my only A for that essay! My tutor reckoned the examiner was bored and enjoyed the break!

Charlize, calm down. At this stage, and in this subject they won't be too worried about "answerning the question" they will be looking for ability. if it sets your mind at ease I got a scholarship to an academic hothouse at 11, my marks breakdown was: English A**
General A**
French A
German A
Sciences C
Maths E

They told my parents that my outstanding achievement and ability on the Arts side more than made up for my comparative duncelike ability in maths and science. The entrance exams will also take notice of what your son's previous school have said (and I remember that they like him a lot!) so CALM DOWN!!!!

Thanks everyone
Fisil that is very encouraging about the oxford exam. Iam starting to think they won't really care hes gone off topic so thanks again.
Marialuisa that is interesting also about your results .
Do any of you know how they come up with a VR score? My ds last report his Verbal Reasoning was 126. How do they get this figure?
For instance I know that VR tests have 100 questions in them so How do they get this higher figure?
What would 90% in VR work out as??
Sorry for all the questions but this has always puzzled me.

Charlize, whatever the number of questions in a test, they work out what an average result is and score that as 100. Then anyone who gets more right than average gets a score of 100+, less than average gets less than 100.

So you can't work out what 90% would score without knowing a) what the average is and b) what each extra right answer is worth.

(I think that's right!)

So does that mean that Ds got 26 marks above whatever the average was?
So if the average in class was 70 out of 100 then he would have scored 96 out of 100.
But that means that the highest mark possible would be 130 and on his report it says 130 + is extremely high so you must be able to get higher than this.

No, it doesn't represent a mark...from the exams our primary school uses the highest index score is 140, which would presumably represent 100% of whatever was possible; but what that is could be anything, depending on what form the questions took and how long they had to do it in, so you can't equate one index point with one correct answer, even when there are 100 answers.

There will be a scale that the markers have to tell them what score each test result is worth, based on whatever is average for that test, and you won't be able to guess what that is - you'll just have to wait and see, charlize - sorry.

Oh - just thought of something else - some tests have an age weighting too.

Arrahhh!! Age Weighting ! My Ds is THE oldest in his year. His birthday is the 2nd sept!!!
Whoops