Verbal reasoning advice

[popsickle555]

DD is sitting two entrance exams in January. Her maths is strong, her English is pretty strong but we are struggling a bit on VR.

She’s using the GL assessment practice papers. Can anyone share what I should be expecting as a ‘decent’ mark? The schools she’s applied to are selective but it is not the most competitive, the preferred one in the region ranks 7th.

There are 80 questions per paper and they have 50 mins to do the paper (this is on the practice ones) in the actual exam she will have 30 mins but I’m not sure on the amount of questions. Currently she’s managing about 1 question per minute, the answer is usually correct but I don’t know how to help her speed up. Any advice is welcome.

Only practice can help
one to speed up , there is no other way

She doesn't have to do the questions in order.... Is there a type of question that she feels most comfortable/confident with and is quickest at ..... Tell her to do these first.

Riddle type questions should probably be left until last because they take a long time

And then if she runs out of time....guess and put any answer to the remaining ones, my DD chose to put b for all her remaining questions.

Pass mark is different for each school I think.... My DD was regularly getting 95-100% in her vr because she just "got it" whereas NVR she was getting 60-70% so vr score helped to bump her total score up.

Practice is the only thing to help speed her up

Thank you, some useful tips here. She’s done another mock test today and got 63%, she’s getting 90-95% correct answers but only managing two thirds of the questions in the allocated time so now we will focus on strategies for speed!! We have 10 days left.

luckily I’m hoping her maths and English will be strong enough to pull the VR score up a bit as she’s usually at 80-85% on those within the time.

Could you possibly link the tests you're using if they're online? DD is doing entrance exams in a fortnight but they don't send out any practice VR papers, only English and Maths

These are the ones she’s been doing:

www.amazon.co.uk/Revised-2019-Assessment-Practice-Reasoning/dp/0708727611