Puzzling CATS scores in year 5 - any thoughts, please?

[confusedinkent]

Dd has always done well at school - top sets for literacy - there or thereabouts for maths - involved, interested and doing well in everything else.

Got CATS results on Friday -
126 for vebal reasoning
110 for quantitive
103 for non verbal.

I know the VR mark is high - but I was a bit surprised at the others. Am I misunderstanding - I though that in these tests the average was 100. So that menas that her other scores are round about average. And is there usually such a big disparity in the scores? And as she's sitting the 11÷ in September I'm a bit worried. Seeing the teacher tomorrow - but any thoughts from anyone?

The bandings are:
extremely low - below 70
moderately low - 70 - 85
average score - 85 - 115
moderately high - 115 - 130
extremely high - 130 - 140

The bands seem very wide!

Does the gap between the VR and the math-y ones show up in her schoolwork, OP? I think I would have expected a top-setter to have a higher quantative score than that - could it have been a blip on the day?

From my experience if the CATS contradict your intuition about and experience of a child ignore them. A child can have an off day or just not get a particular activity. They can be a useful guide but should not be taken as gospel.

seeker- gettinginto the 'top set' is heavily dependent on the ability of the other children

Hiya
I have just got the results of my sons cat tests (year 5), which he sat on 24th May and I have to say I am really disappointed. He desperately wants to go to a science school and the local science school is the boys grammar. He is a quiet boy with just a few close friends - science is his only love really. He has dyspraxia although we are still waiting for official diagnosis as the school told us 2 years ago he had it but not that we had to go and get it made official at the hospital until we found out in March this year. The results he got were, 106 verbal, 115 quantative, 103 non verbal. Though his last test results at the end of term 5 were 4a reading, 4b maths and 3a literacy - I know since then his reading level has gone up to 5c but he hasn't done his end of term tests yet for literacy and numeracy. He is having 11+ tutoring and has been since early April.
I can't find his sisters results for her year 5 cats but I think they were all over 110 and she passed the 11+ quite easily and is now in year 9 - however she is a March baby and he is September so I realise that makes a difference.
My question is how relevant are the CATS compared to the 11+ and how much on average would they improve each month with tuition? He sits the test in September.
Also if we do manage to get him diagnosed before he sits the test would they make any allowances for his dyspraxia? He is only getting 20 minutes extra help a week with fine motor skills but will get more once the diagnosis is made official.
I know I sound like an ultra competitive mum but it really means so much to him to get into a science school and the local comprehensives do not teach anywhere near the same standard!
Thankyou all

The CATS supposedly give an indication of the levels your DS is likely to get in the SATS and also give an indication as to whether DS is GS material. However as someone has said it could just have been a 'bad day' and a lot depends on what area and how competitive your GS are.

I think the best bet would be to discuss with the school as they will know how representative these are for your DS and will know from previous children what sort of scores he needs to be achieving for a Grammar School.

Can I ask what you menu by a "science school"?

Just because a school is a "specialist science school" doesn't necessarily mean that their science teaching is any better than any other school.

Thankyou both for your thoughts. Curlew in grammar schools they teach the 3 sciences and have a minimum of 3 lessons of 50 minutes each per week. Today my daughter had double physics (so 100 minutes) and the boys grammar school do the same. Because science is specialist at the boys grammar they have science clubs after school too and they do computer science as GCSE and A levels which really appeals to my boy. Local schools just teach 2 lessons of 'science' a week - by that I mean chemistry, physics and biology are not seperate. The local school is rural science and sport's specialist. "We readily incorporate the fantastic school farm and all year 7 students complete a unit of work linked to the farm and Rural Dimension." I spoke to the school and asked what happens when my son can't take part in the rural science (which is where they incorporate the biology part of science) as he has asthma, hayfever and allergic to many animals and apparently he will sit in a classroom or the library on his own and read it all - there is no way my son is being treated like that!!
I think it may have been a bad day as we tested him tonight at home on the reasoning and he got 70 out of 80 questions right!
I may have answered part of my own quetion here as I seem to think his sister got 108 for quantative, 112 for non verbal and 120 for verbal improving to 118, 130 and 136 in the actual test 4 months later but no idea if this is an average improvement?
Thankyou for reading.