Herts Consortium test last september

[sittingbythepoolwithenzo]

I understand from the playground chat that there were more questions than previous years - does anyone know whether this was maths or VR?

Thanks.

Perhaps the children reporting this were including the familiarisation questions?

Hi Three, I wondered whether you knew? (You're fairly local to me. ).

I'm not sure - some of the children in year 6 were saying that there were more questions than they had expected, and that they didn't finish.

Did you hear anything about it?

No, I hadn't, but you are the second person to mention this today.

It must be that time of year again.

I've decided against employing a tutor and helping DS at home. He getting the knack of the Bond papers, but I'm looking to try some others, and was just wondering about speed etc.

As far as I know, Maths is still 50 questions in 50 minutes (Bond is fine) and VR is 100 questions in 45 minutes (the VR papers have a wider variety of questions than Bond, so try a range of papers for VR).

That's great, thanks. We're going to work on that basis. I've just ordered another set of papers today, so we'll see what they look like.

Could really do without this, tbh. I'd far rather he was reading or learning something fun.

Ds said it was exactly as he had expected it in terms of the number of questions, and everyone coming out of the test seemed fairly relaxed and not surprised. He took the Bucks 11+ the next week, and that was absolutely dreadful, many of the poor children coming out said that they hadn't had enough time to finish the paper.

Ps we didn't have a tutor, did it all at home, used all the usual suspects in terms of test papers etc. It was fine!

Thanks shred.

What amazed me was that the children who seemed surprised by the paper had tutors. I wondered whether I was missing something.

Hope it goes ok in march.

My personal take on it, based on what ds said, was that the questions were not particularly hard in themselves, but you had to stay focussed on two things - firstly what they were actually asking (and not what you thought they were asking) and secondly not to get bogged down in a tricky question. If you couldn't answer it in 45 seconds or whatever the figure was, you had to move on.

Lots and lots of timed practice papers I'm afraid.....good luck!

In the VR, 25 seconds per question leaves 3 minutes to go back and do any you passed on the first time.

Dd sat last yr & exactly as expected. Once you have mastered diff question types then work on speed.