Natural ability for 11 plus (reasoning)

[lll36]

I recently read an article by the Guardian which was saying an exam board CEM claimed their tests "natural ability" and "potential" for the 11 plus but the statistics showed more private educated children were passing. What are you thoughts?

Testing for 'natural ability' is always a fallacy. Every written exam can be prepped for - which privately-educated children will be. It's very hard - I would say impossible - to create a written exam that won't advantage those with the resources to prep their children.

11+ sorts out the children who will be good at passing exams, either through natural ability, their own drive to study or their families ethos to education and the necessity to work at it. It always will be a mixture of these things.

IMO state schools should teach to the test to help those children who do not have parents who gained a high educational level, rather than perpetuate the myth of natural ability being the only factor.

Natural ability is totally overrrated. Practice in doing the examples and in having the answers explained will improve performance. That is why there is serious tutoring for the 11+ - it works.

CEM is hideously tutorable. Tutoring rates rocketed in our area when it was introduced. Ds and classmates did CAT tests at school at the start of Y5, which showed ds to be in the top centile in maths and nvr and top decile in vr. This was a genuine test of ability as neither he nor his classmates were being tutored at the time. His teacher told us we'd need to get him tutored as there is so much going on that it inflates all the scores in the CEM test so we couldn't rely on ds' ability. He's sitting the test next week. I wish we didn't live in a grammar school area. All the kids are stressed out and hyped up by the exam prep.

Tutoring for the test aside not surprised that privately educated kids doing better. Natural ability is in part genetic and kids at private school have parents who are more successful financially do in part to having more natural ability. I know lots of exceptions and not everybody but over a large group of people I think probably true. (As an aside private school children are also taller on average - generations of being more successful and better diet:))