Why is DD scoring so much lower on Atom than CAT?

[CloudbustingKim]

My DD is 10 (Y6) and sitting in the top few of the top sets. At the end of last year the school stated her CAT scores were 141/135/123/121 and that she would comfortably get into most schools at 11+.

She's been using Atom since August and we've just over two months to her 11+ exam. On sitting the ISEB pre-test mock exams, she's getting SAS scores of 108/92/99/92 respectively and I'm panicking!

I know the SAS score is 8-10 points below CAT but it's still quite a drop and I've gone from feeling very reassured by the school to panicking that she might only just scrape a pass.

Am I missing something here? Have others had this experience of starting on low scores and pulling them up significantly before the exam? I had wondered if the Atom curriculum will intensify as we near the exam date but also wondered if the school's CAT scores are reliable i.e. are they independently done or could the school have exaggerated them somehow?

I'm finding it hard to put all my trust in an app as if there's more work to be done, I need to know now!

Is she trying with 100% effort on Atom? Result difference could be that in CATs at school she tries much harder. Skipping a few questions, running out of time or making silly mistakes can really lower the score very quickly. Lower scores are more common when practising but I agree those are a lot lower.

Really look through what she is getting wrong with her. Cover the right /wrong answer bit and see if she can pick the right answer when reviewing. Then target those areas more with atom practice.

Thank @SweetPelican I think you're probably on to something there. She does it on her iPad in a fairly relaxed manner and I think I need to tighten up a bit and make sure the setting is a bit more formal.

We saw this and so did many other girls we know.

My daughter sailed the ISEB and was offered places at two of the top 5 indies so I wouldn't stress. Again, this happened to a few children in her circle.

The pretest is an adaptive test so the questions get harder if you get them right. If your daughter makes a careless mistake early on, it gets very difficult to hit the higher scores as a result of the algorithm they use. I would get her to treat it like an actual test at the table and really focus on getting the first 6-8 right. It doesn't matter if you don't finish all the questions. As the questions get harder inevitably it will take longer for each question. My daughter only did half the questions but scored over 125 for VR and NVR so accuracy is clearly scored more highly than completeness.

She should also be using pencil and paper for Maths and VR (but not for English and NVR). The harder questions require some working out so if she has been trying to do it all mentally that might also explain why she's making mistakes.

@OhShutIt Thanks for the reassurance it’s not just her!

@schmarn Really good tips, thank you so much.

How did she do?

We have the same experience - be it CATs or ISEB, with atom always coming in way lower than the actual results achieved by our DD. I think it's possible that Atom wants you to keep paying for tuition and it's their belief that if you think you're already acing it, you may be less like to remain subscribed. They say it's because the benchmark is set by independent school kids; yet in most independent schools the spread will be wide at prep level. I suspect it's just skewed to seem harder to encourage you to keep paying. We take atomlearning results (and those 'how you compare to other kids applying for X school' charts) with a pinch of salt and expect she will get way higher than atom thinks - and she always does and got offers from her desired schools.

We have a very similar experience.
Having looked at the questions and compared them to practice papers you can get via other sources, I think that Atom routinely asks questions that are a lot harder in Maths. (In English some of the questions are also highly ambiguous/poorly worded so that it’s very hard to reasonably work out what they deem the correct answer.)

I imagine that the Maths is harder either to make the experience of the real exam feel straightforward, or in order to make you worry and pay for their tutoring service.