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.

My DS found it very difficult and didn't finish any of the sections. He said no one in his group did. He thought it was harder than Tiffin round two but not in terms of questions. More just the time pressure.

That seems the general feeling - so I supposed the kind of exam that is designed not to be finished.
Interesting that your DS found it harder than Tiffin round 2 (by the way, well done him for progressing to that!). We did not do that but DS said that definitely harder than KGS.

DS prefers paper exams generally. I think Atom has definitely put him off computer based tests. He also said the same as yours re KGS. He quite liked the Learning Workshop although there was another boy with the same name and DS had his label on his coat which was on the back of the chair! I'm not expecting good news later this week.

I think my DD also prefers paper exams (she feels more in control of what to do and when).

We have a strange week ahead, potentially 2 schools telling us whether we go to stage 2 (and not looking particularly good on either front). And we might even her final result from one!! Plus Emanuel exam.

It's the waiting for news that's stressful isn't it? I realise that I'm a glass half full person during this whole process but it's just so hard to predict.

Atom Learning received a cash investment of USD £25 million in Dec 2021 from a bank. The mushrooming of its use as an exam (rather than just learning) platform has swiftly followed. How can this have been allowed?

@Daydreamscometrue Agree. I am not good at waiting!! And this whole process is a waiting game with lots of chapters and, in my mind, unnecessarily so (most of the schools have moved their exams forward, in some cases by months) but offers still coming in mid-February.

Yes the dreaded February wait. I'm grateful we know about the KGS interviews ahead of the Christmas holidays.

can I ask a potentially stupid question, Radnor tomorrow is also CEM, but presumably the schools can set the difficulty of the test? Or do you think Radnor is going to be as hard as Ibstock seems to have been? x

@Daydreamscometrue yes, holding onto the warm feeling from KGS too!

@confu5ed I am not sure, tbh.
We have used CEM 10 minutes' tests and DD is fine doing them (sometimes with spare time after 12-15 questions) but this was a whole new level!
It may be that they do not adjust the level of difficulty or speed but they adjust the pass mark!

The whole thing is utterly corrupt. Someone should look into this. I cannot believe schools are letting this company be in charge of their admissions process. It also puts parents in a tricky situation as you feel pressured into using atom to prepare for exams, as they are the ones writing the exams.

We didn’t use atom at all this time around as I can’t stand it, following older dc’s exam a few years ago. We might well come to regret that decision.

I think anything adaptive risks being fundamentally unfair and biased and I believe all schools should revert to non-adaptive testing.

Yes it is very weird how this has just been accepted.

It is puzzling why the senior schools would want this. Godolphin and Latymer is one of the “Hammersmith trio”, with every ambition of continuing as one of the best schools in the country. However, as part of the consortium, they have accepted selecting girls using this chaotic platform.
It is bad for the students using it but surely also bad for the schools who rely on these exams as a selection tool?

My DD did CEM at both GHS and SPGS. SPGS is more difficult.

Thank you x

It will be interesting to see which DDs are selected for G&L and LU using the Atom entrance exams this year. Will these new exams actually result in any different selection of students? We'll find out soon enough.

I don't think LU is using Atom - on their website it says they're still doing their own paper-based tests. But given many of the experiences on here thus far re PHS, I'm imagining there will be a number of complaints going in re PHS and Consortium schools when emails go out re second round / interviews, and girls who were expected to sail through don't...

I’m not even sure how it is even supposed to work.
If 1000 girls try for G&L they probably all have a “true” theoretical Atom score in the range of 100-140.
If you then apply an Atom error/inconsistency adjustment which is probably + or - 20 (by my experience) you basically end up with a random distribution.
It might be possible to identify the extremes of the range but trying to sort the 800 girls in the middle will surely be impossible.

Apologies, you are correct. Sorry.

That may very well be true. Although, I wonder how previous used Consortium tests differentiated the mid-800 students as well. My only observation is that when you look at students taking different tests for different schools, often there's significant overlap in the students who receive offers, meaning regardless of the exam, many of the same kids were given offers. Again, we'll see if this year is any different. I don't know.

@bjmin - as you say, it will be interesting to see whether the overlap is same as in previous years. But still so tricky as you never know how much is the lack of alignment is because of factors that have been there like children having a bad day or the exam focusing on different aspects (not only scope of the exam but focus on timing vs depth, for instance) and how much because of the issues with the new exam platforms.

Plus I assume that the secondary schools do not share the raw results so schools might become aware of the most blatant cases but it could be quite tricky to know for those 'more in the middle' / more marginal cases.

It will always be tricky but we have never had to factor in this adaptive aspect that essentially means each girl is setting a different test and relying on the Atom wizardry to create comparative results.

LU also have to sift through 1000 results and there will also be a big middle portion that is hard to separate. 500 kids might have scores within a 10% range. However brutal this might be you at least know that the playing field was level and all children had an equal chance.

With Atom it is just a coin flip. The same candidate might get 120 or might get 140 depending what questions are asked, how the difficulty was defined by the machine, the subsequent questions asked and the SAS score generated.

Related to the above, does anyone know when first round results for PHS will be released?
More generally, do senior schools (which by now have received school reports and/or references) sense check them before releasing them?

PHS will let you know the results of round 1 in ‘early January’ for round 2 on 18th January. Not sure why there is such a large delay given that round 1 is computer marked so presumably they already have the results.

I wondered precisely this last year. In the end the email came on 7th January, which seemed like an oddly long time after an entirely computer based test (which I think was Atom-based last year although PHS didn’t specifically say so, as dd said it looked just the same as the Atom website).