Unexpected MidYIS results

[TheTreesTheTrees]

We've just received my year 7 son's MidYIS score and wanted to check my understanding of it. For context, he's definitely clever but he's never been the best in his class in tests. They used to do some sort of standardised tests in primary and he was about 118 - 125 most of the time. To be fair, his whole cass was fairly high achieving.

His MidYIS score is over 143 which Chatgpt is telling me is very high - top 0.3% high. Given his previous good but not excellent school work I was surprised. We've had no info from the school other than this single score.

I'm trying to marry this score and his performance at school. The only thing I can think of (assuming he didn't just fluke the MidYIS) is that his ADHD is preventing him doing as well as he could in normal school tests. He had loads of ideas but struggles to get them written down and makes silly mistakes.

Does anyone have a similar experience? If it's his ADHD (which school know about) is there anything I should consider to help him overcome it and achieve his apparently high potential?

Why did he take this test? Is he in one of those schools which use it to divide kids into sets or streams?

I think all these tests are highly imprecise. There are huge differences in how the various schools organise their tests (11+, midyis, etc). Eg for the same type of questions some schools give much more time than others, so you can have a test which assigns the same score to a kid who might have answered in 50 seconds, but not 30, and to one who didn't answer at all.

In fairness, my main concern would be if, as a result of this test, the child is assigned to a set or stream which isn't adequate for him, i.e. too advanced or not advanced enough, where he is pushed too much or not enough.

Also, it might be useful to amend the title of the post, to ask parents of children with ADHD about their experience with standardises tests (of which the midyis is only one of many)

MidYIS is designed to measure a pupil's ability rather than what they have been taught. It is a good predictor of future academic achievement and also helps teachers identify a pupil's strengths and weaknesses. A very high score like this suggests that your son has a lot of potential, but that potential has not been fully unlocked at primary school. His secondary school teachers should use the MidYIS information to help him achieve his potential. I suggest you talk to them about what you can do to help.

It suggests he has a lot of potential. 118 -125 is also a good score. Things like maturity, the test environment, whether the test was online/written, time of day and motivation will all impact on ability to focus. Is he on medication? Medication (for some), motivation and a lot of support from home with organisation and homework seem to help the most. Plus the right school environment. I also read an article by successful adults with ADHD and they all said exercise helped enormously. One went for a run before very important meetings and another swam every day.

He's at a private school which tests all year 7 pupils. He had to do an exam to get in but I don't think it was that hard. He has friends who did entrance exams for state grammar and that test was much harder (some children did multiple entrance exams).

I think they do the test, precisely like someone said, to identify potential. They are not streamed until year 8 and at that point it's only in maths and following end of year tests to see how they are getting on.

His primary was good so I think it's less about teaching and maybe more about his ADHD. That's not to say we won't be discussing this result and how we can get him delivering his apparent potential.

He's not on medication as we, but particularly DH (undiagnosed ADHD), aren't keen.

You need to look at the individual components of Midyis, not just the overall score, but 143 is very high.

You would expect mainly 9s at GCSE with that score.

But people also have good days and bad days, and sometimes the scores are deceptive. But the school should have very high expectations of your son.

The test was computer adaptive, so if you get a question right it gives you a harder one. If you get one wrong it gives you an easier one. The questions did run out on at least some of the tests before his time was up.

I think this worked better for him than written tests as it didn't require handwriting skills and meant that he could work fast. When he's writing his brain runs ahead of his ability to get things down. I know this is true for everyone but it seems more so for him. The computer test just seemed to be clicking buttons.

I got the breakdown. It's very interesting. The overall score is higher than any of the individual scores, which is apparently perfectly normal because they are weighted differently.

For vocab and maths he got over 138 in both. For non verbal 118 and for skills 106. So there's a huge gap of over 30 points between his 'skills' (which covers attention, working memory and processing speed) versus core intelligence (ease of grasping concepts etc).

It makes total sense in terms of how he's been doing so far in school. It's all in his head, he just can't get it out in a timely manner.

This is really interesting. My son did one of these for a grammar stream entrance test. He missed the actual grammar school by one mark (which we are proud of as he had very little tutoring from myself and not years of paid tutoring, and he hasn't got a straightforward home situation either). We are hoping this works well for him instead as he struggles with handwriting too and has attention issues.

Even if he doesn't score well and misses the grammar stream again, this test might at least indicate where he is struggling and be quite useful to us.