Sutton grammar schools

[postmanpatP]

Does anybody know what percentage is usually needed to pass the selective entrance test for Sutton Grammar, please ? I am sure it varies from one year to the other, but is 80 or 85% usually enough ?

Pass mark doesn't guarantee your a place as it is with intake every year it is going to vary.
I would say by the time my kids were sitting exams (4 and 6 years ago) they were doing their full tests at home at over 90% every single time.
The last 10-15% is often hardest to improve on.

The Sutton selective eligibility test was introduced for the first time last year. The passmark is set after the exam is sat so that a suitable number of applicants then go on to sit the written papers for each school. Last year over 2,200 boys sat and 799 passed, so you are looking to be in the top third of the cohort. If you are sitting one of the Sutton Grammar PTA mocks then you will get your results along with everyone elses and get an idea out of 1,000-odd sitting where you came. Girls are sitting the test for the first time this year.

In terms of %, I think that the different commercial publishers are of differing degrees of difficulty. In terms of the GL Assessment papers usually 75-85% would be sufficient in maths and English to be of selective ability. But as antimatter says, it is less about what score your child gets, and entirely about what score every other child gets. The amount of preparation that children are doing seems to be increasing each year.

The pass mark for Sutton Grammar School mock tests held in May was 216. Does anybody know if this is an unusually low pass rate as I expected the pass rate to be higher ? Also, are those mock tests a fair reflection of the level of difficulty to be expected in the real tests ? I have explained to my son that the real tests are likely to be harder as they are in 3 months' time and the schools might expect the candidates to know more things by then. I don't want my son to be lulled into a false sense of security. Please may I have your thoughts ?

216 is the standardised mark across the population who sat - it is essentially a statistical measure. The sutton mocks do not include age or gender within their standardisation but I think that the real exams will. Last year just over 2200 boys sat and 799 passed, so they were looking to pass approximately a third. 200 is the mean mark, so 216 should allow allow about a third of those sitting to go through to the second rounds, ie those tests set by the individual grammar schools. But essentially it will be down to each school to decide how many they let sit the second stage, and of these up to a half will not pass, and even a pass does not guarantee a place. The first eligibility test is really just a hurdle to clear to ensure that the grammars do not have to mark an excessive number of creative writing scripts etc, and for a school such as Wilsons, the multiple choice eligibility test will only count towards 20% of the final mark - it is the second set of papers which are far more challenging.

In one sense the comparison of actual difficulty of the papers set as the mock to in the real exam is irrelevant provided that it allows a spread of marks in roughly a binomial curve. Last years Kent maths test was unusually difficult, but that just meant that instead of needing a raw score of 80%+ to get achieve the level required for a superselective, a mark of 70%+ would do. Ie you have to get a score in the top third of those sitting, regardless of the difficult of the papers set.

Hi PostmanpatP, thank you for your questions.I was wondering about these things too. I have 2 girls that took the test. One achieved slightly below the pass mark and one slightly above, so very worrying.

These tests should be viewed as a chance to acclimatise to the conditions. There are plenty of candidates who nominally fail and yet sail through the real tests.

"The pass mark for Sutton Grammar School mock tests held in May was 216. Does anybody know if this is an unusually low pass rate as I expected the pass rate to be higher ? Also, are those mock tests a fair reflection of the level of difficulty to be expected in the real tests ?

Why do you think a pass mark of 216 is low? what would you have expected it to be? When you refer to pass rate, do you mean the number of candidates achieving this score (216) as a percentage of the total number of candidates sitting the test?

"216 is the standardised mark across the population who sat - it is essentially a statistical measure. The sutton mocks do not include age or gender within their standardisation but I think that the real exams will."

Interesting. If conventional standard scores are generally somewhere between 70 and 130, is the score of 216 the sum of two standard scores? or something else?

"The first eligibility test is really just a hurdle to clear to ensure that the grammars do not have to mark an excessive number of creative writing scripts etc, "

Interesting again. Is the timing of tests and results this year such that it prevents parents from wasting one of their choices for a child who would not go on to the second stage tests?

If so, it's a win-win for both sides.

"If conventional standard scores are generally somewhere between 70 and 130, is the score of 216 the sum of two standard scores? or something else?"

The mock had 2 papers, maths and English, each of which resulted in a standardised score, so 216 was the combined total. Each of the 5 grammar schools uses the scores differently. And certainly last year the schools could set their own passmarks for round 1, though in the end they didn't - they all allowed the same children through to round 2.

" Is the timing of tests and results this year such that it prevents parents from wasting one of their choices for a child who would not go on to the second stage tests?"

Off the top of my head I believe that parents will have pass/fail results for round one before the end of Sept, and most round 2 exams are in early Oct with pass/fail results out before halfterm (Sutton Grammar being the exception as their 2nd round isn't until November).

That said, more children will pass the exams than there are places available, so it is still possible that a CAF place will be "wasted".

Anyone know what a child should be getting in gl papers to stand a chance for wallington and nonsuch girls ?

We viewed 80% to be a good %age to aim for as what might equate to a First round pass. For the boys schools I think that the creative writing in the second round was the area that made the most difference.

That said, the feedback certainly from Wally Girls last year was that the vocabulary in the VR was harder than the published GL papers - possibly closer to the Walsh papers. Obviously VR as such isn't being tested, but I would still go through the Walsh material to cover the vocab as this can still be tested in the new format.

Thanks, Lady muck. By first time round pass do you mean the multiple choice first set if exams before taking the school ones?

Yes.

It is hard to be precise, but as I said earlier on the thread, I think that under exam conditions a result of 75%-85% seems to be in the right ballpark for the GL papers (depending on when you were born in the yeargroup). Certainly I know of boys who didn't finish the English mc paper in the SET last year, but still got through (and eventually got grammar places).

Do the gl papers get harder as you go through them ?

Don't think so. Susan Daughty ones do and Walsh do, but not GL I think. The first NVR paper is definitely the hardest, but I'm guessing you don't have to do that one!

WHS head confirmed that at no stage would the entrance tests for Wallington involve VR or NVR. It was purely maths and English.

How much work are people doing in a week?

Not doing it this year (thank goodness!), but casting my mind back to last year - during the holidays when we weren't away on a complete break, we aimed for 4 timed papers a week, plus corrections/learnings from the paper of the day before (so probably around 7 hours per week usually over 4 days). This increased in the last couple of weeks to 8 papers in the week (to build stamina!). I pretty much ignored any non-relevant homework set by the school in September until the exams were done. Ds may have been too ill to attend school on days when the timetable was pointless light in the first few weeks.

This seemed to be on the high end of the amount of effort that others admitted to be putting in. But then I came across the fully-booked tutor who was running 3 hour sessions daily during the holidays as well as every night after school, and all day Saturday for the 2 weeks before the exams (with most children attending all available sessions!). I almost set up a competing business with a couple of friends once I worked out how much money she made from setting multiple choice papers.

Can anyone help with their thoughts about moving from the independent sector to grammar? I'm sure DS would cope just fine, but what about parental access to school, involvement in teaching/progress, fewer facilities, fewer co-curricular activities, etc.? Do they really matter, or am I just too used to being the "customer"? (I've name changed - been here 10+ years though).

My son's birthday is on 30th November. How many points are added to younger children's scores, please ? Are the points added for the first round of tests or not.
This could potentially make a big difference, especially if extra points are added to both rounds.
I am very grateful to everybody answering my questions.

The scores are age standardised, so it isn't quite as simple as "adding marks" (though one of the grammars used to do that as a simplification).

It is probably easier to focus on the fact that you need to be in the top third of your peers to pass round one, and in your case it will be November born peers. But if you're very keen to work it out, my ds and his friend both scored the same raw percentage in last year's Kent maths test, and the 3 months difference between them resulted in 1 additional point to the younger's standardised score. Thankfully they both qualified for the superselectives.

My DS sat some mock tests recently and came out 4th out of 45 boys with 88% in English. I was surprised that he only got 108 points although I know that DS is an 'old' November boy and that the tests were age standardised. Assuming for instance that the 3 boys in front of him were Summer babies and got 3 more points each anyway because of their age, I still can't understand why DS only got 108 points. Am I right in thinking that whoever came first was allocated 140 marks ? More importantly, if DS only got 108 points, does this mean that hardly any boy with lower percentages got 108 points ( age standardisation taken into account) ?
What I am trying to say is : Are standardised scores of small groups ( in this case just 45 boys ) less representative of possible results on the day of the real 11+ exam ?
As DS was in the top 10% of boys, why do his points only put him in the top third of the cohort ( a small cohort, I agree ...) ?
A big thank-you in advance.

The standardised scores are meant to tell you information about the cohort and where your child scored. So the most important thing is whether you know what cohort was standardised - was it just the 45 who sat, or was it a larger cohort eg all the poe who had ever sat that mock, or a random selection of say 1000 year 5 pupils who were asked to sit the paper in order to standardise it.

Secondly, standardisation looks at what the mean or average mark was for the cohort and then measures how far every other mark was statistically from the mean. So it is very likely in a small sample that the top mark wasn't 140. But the mean mark will always be 100.

So in the 2 scenarios above, if the standardisation was done across the cohort of 45, there may not have been enough different birth months to produce meaningful differentials by birth month, but it is likely that say the average mark was just a few points below your DCs, and many children scored in a small range eg of the 45 most scored between say 70 and 90%.

If a larger cohort were standardised, then it suggest that most children scored highly on this paper, and the 45 children who sat weren't at the high end of the scores.

Of the 2 I suspect the former is more likely, and all the data really tells you is that he did well in this cohort of fairly well prepared children. It would be hard to extrapolate to an actual standardised score, but usually you are trying to score with the top 20/10/5% of candidates depending on which school you're aiming for, so I would view it as a good outcome, but it should also warn you that just dropping a couple of marks could pull them a lot further down the ranked list. A lot of children will be on very similar marks.

Does that make any sense?!

I read somewhere about an English question where you are expected to find which word goes in the middle,e.g ; ocean, sea, puddle,etc. What does that mean ? Do you have to put the words in alphabetical order ?
Very grateful for any answers.

For that particular question I believe that they had to identify the middle item from a list according to size, (so from "pond, puddle, sea, ocean, lake" the answer would be lake) but of course a question of alphabetical order could come up instead. There isn't a fixed format of question as such, but the children should be able to tell what to do from the question itself.

That's it! Back home from the Test, DS said that today's test was a lot more challenging than the Mock Test. He felt more stretched doing the Maths test. Literacy was managed better by him with 15 minutes to spare. Many 'super-duper' confident boys around (in my DS's opinion). Probably 1 mile long queue around the school to get in, but moving at a good pace, DS got inside around 9:10 am. Everything went smoothly. Credit to all those teachers, staff, older pupils and prefects who welcomed us in the morning.