SW London Girls' Private & Grammar - applying for year 7 in 2023

[EmotiveBubblez]

i myself have been looking for this thread and have been unsuccessful. Saw a couple people mention it over the past day or so on the 2022 one.

so here we go, albeit a bit late.

has everyone visited all the schools on their lists?

how many schools are everyone applying to?

what schools are you applying to?

how is the preparation going?

i know some exams have taken place, how did they go?

wishing all the whirls good luck with preparation and exams, hope we all find the right schools for our daughters.

@LondonMum20222 thank you for your kind words!

Good luck to all DC sitting exams on this weekend!

Hear hear - also know how it feels from Tiffin. Good luck to all, it's a stressful time x

We had a no for older DC from a school they really wanted so I've been there too. X

Dd at PHS year 7 now. If it's the same format as last year then it's Atom based, no VR.

Do others also find the ISEB puzzling? DD reporting that "it did not go very well" and that the questions were very tricky ... so difficult to gauge if tricky because she was having a bad day or tricky because of the iterative nature!

Are PHS using atom for their tests then? I knew about consortium but didn't know about putney

@emanonsah Yes, the PHS test is set by Atom too.

Hi all, is anyone on here sitting LU? if yes, have you received the assessment invite yet for 7 dec?

Anyone doing Hampton on Saturday? Getting nervous for DS as it’s his favourite but so hard to get a place! Any tips on this one because past papers are available?

Sorry meant to say past papers aren’t available

I can’t believe that a for-profit platform like Atom is the provider for both the new Consortium and PHS exams!

Honestly, don't get me started. It's so wrong on so many levels. I can't believe a) the secondary schools have signed up to it and b) there hasn't been more uproar about it. It's pretty much a way for Atom to print money. And the platform is dreadful anyway!

Agree, it’s so wrong on so many levels. I’m still reeling from learning that PHS signed up to it (I only knew about Consortium). And fully agree it’s not even a good platform!

@Westbournemum I have zero faith in Atom's ability to run a robust exam and marking system (given the marking system is all over the place even on short tests throughout the platform). I would lay money on the Consortium going down a different route within a couple of years (after our kids have been the guinea pigs for a failed experiment...)

I completely agree.
More generally, I am quite wary of the whole 'iterative' approach as it seems rather non-transparent both on how the tests are constructed and the results. There was quite a lot of discussion last year about how ISEB had thrown rather strange results (some parents had managed to get hold of the scores, which is not common practice).
I may be too 'traditional' but I cannot see what is wrong with just some traditional exams, common for all children, with questions with different levels of difficulty to allow for a mark spread. Less fanciful but seems more solid and reliable.

My DD so far has done CEM at SPGS and GHS, and ISEB at LEH. She found ISEB most comfortable and least pressured.

I've heard from DD's Year 6 friends that SPGS was pretty tough and very time-pressured. I guess the upside is that everyone seems to have found it really hard.

Having used Atom a bit, I think the adaptive approach is highly questionable, and throws up worrying results (eg getting an "Atom score" of 80 for a supposedly adaptive test where the child gets 100% right on 30 questions in very quick time, that never get any harder - it literally makes no sense). It does rather beg the question as to what their scoring criteria are. And it's really unclear as to how and when the questions get harder on the adaptive test - and how and when they get easier (and how much easier) if you get one wrong.

I totally agree that it would be so much better - and more transparent, and fairer - just to have the same written paper for everyone that gets progressively harder, like SPGS or CLSG do. But it's more time intensive (and therefore more expensive) to mark those, so instead we all pay £150 for a computer to mark them instead.

LU just sent out the invite.

@Christmascactu yes my DS will be there :)

I will @ you on another thread where me and someone else were discussing Hampton.

Agree - it is rather a "black box".
But it is attractive for schools, who outsource the selection to this "shiny" and, one assumes cost-effective tool, though I find interesting that the 2 schools that we applied for with the lowest registration fee use their own exam rather than a platform.

Completely agree.

I couldn't agree more re Atom, what a scam. The scores on Atom are nonsensical and both my children (one in 2020 and one this year) have said that on the exam day, the ISEB was not adaptive as all their friends had the same questions. Not sure how accurate that is but it did put seeds of doubt into my mind.

my son is sitting Hampton too

There are other computer-marked options available on the market, such as CEM used by SPGS and CLSG for round 1 (or indeed ISEB, albeit that is adaptive) if fast marking is a criteria for the schools. It really feels like the secondary schools opting to use Atom as an actual exam platform have fallen for some marketing spiel without the end user (the kids sitting the exam!) at the core of the decision. Disappointing.