Anyone else's DC doing CAT tests to determine ability levels at intake?

[OrmIrian]

DS#1 is, on Friday. Anyone has any experience of these? Are they SATs type things?

They are tedious and take nearly all day. you do them in short sets of questions like 6 of the same kind at a time. Then another kind so there's lots of short breaks. You do verbal - fill in a word in a sentence, quantitative - number stuff and non-verbal - codes, patterns, sequences etc. Like 11+ used to be in the old days. Is it still like that now? They are meant to give school an idea of what areas children should do well in GCSEs, help them set targets and have expectations for that child. School also use them to show they have added value ie helped that child improve. I wouldn't worry about it. You probably won't get told results. They don't at our school.

Thanks. I didn't even know they had to do them until a few weeks back. I don't think DS is bothered. After SATs I think anything is an improvement.

My ds did them at the school I teach at. He was predicted an average NC level of 5b at end of year 9.

Is now at end of Y9, and is expected to get 7's. They predicted his best subject to be Textile Technology, despite the fact he is outstanding at Maths.

I think they are rubbish, based on my experience of them in this way. I pay little attention to them when I get data through on kids I teach. they managed to get ds totally and completely wrong.

They are used for informing teachers, and predicting grades, and aren't they succesful at that? [sarcastic emoticon]

Ah. Waste of time then

But here they are just to give some idea of what sets they should start in. So I guess they can be moved up or down as required.

I find the stadardised scores useful to help get a general feel for a child. I think they're often quite useful in sussing out hidden ability. I taught a boy who came into secondary with a level 2 in Maths, yet on his non-verbal reasoning he scored a 132. God alone knows what happened in Maths at primary, his literacy was appallingly bad, which is probably why he struggled across the curriculum, but he was shifted out of the bottom set and with in class support was pretty successful in Maths.

Their predictive power I am very about, because there are just too many variables involved in later exam success.