CLGS - CEM test 11+!

[mommyofthreeSE]

Hello, My daughter will take the CEM assessment for City of London School for Girls. For example, The test will have around 138 questions, and she is supposed to finish them in 60 minutes. If she runs out of time, should she guess the remaining questions in the last minutes, or does the school consider the wrong-answer rate?
For example:
If one child answers all 138 questions and gets 87 correct,
and another child answers only 100 out of 138 questions and gets 85 correct,
which child will receive the higher score?
Thank you.

There is no negative marking on the CEM assessment I don’t think, so it’s better for them to try and answer as many things as possible.

There’s no negative marking, they look at absolute score and then rank them. They set their cut off and invite to next stage.

CEM is all about timing and speed and accuracy.

I highly recommended using Pretest Plus Practice CEM tests, they’re the best simulation of the test. Our tutor recommended to us and compared to atom it was night and day. Really prepared my child for their Cem test.

My understanding is better to guess if you can. My daughter did a CEM test today and there was no timer on the test and she didn’t know how long she had for each section. They get a warning that time is nearly up, but she also didn’t know how much time you had left at that stage.

Do not know about City of London.
But you need to find out if the CEM test is “adaptive’ aka gets progressively harder. If it is, rushing questions if definitely not the right approach. You can get higher scores answering the first few correctly and into the hard stuff.

It’s not adaptive. ISEB is adaptive.

CEM tests are not adaptive, and there is a timer counting down how much time you have left for each module

I found Pretest invaluable for the Missing Words section, which Atom doesn't provide at all. Apart from that, I found Pretest overly hard compared to the real thing (and thus demotivating) and incredibly expensive.

Atom was our bread and butter, with a sprinkling of Pretest to cover what Atom didn't. If we had our time again, I would actually only buy the Missing Words bundles.

thank you all

Should I take the Atom standardised score (103) seriously? Online it says that getting around 50% on the CLSG CEM test is considered very good, because the exam is very fast, hard and most children cannot finish all the questions. My daughter works quickly and gets many correct answers, yet her Atom standardised score is quite low.

My daughter sat it today for GHS. The exam was easier than Atom. It’s very fast paced and your DD should answer all the questions if possible. There’s no timer on the screen. I heard for very selective schools the SAS should be above 120. My DD started a couple weeks ago on SAS 123 and has done around 5 tests on Atom and the last couple have been 135 and 137 so her score improved quite quickly. She also did 5 CEM tests on Pretest plus for additional practice

@HanSB thank you. I asked someone I know who used to be a teacher at City of London School for Girls. She told me not to worry too much about Atom’s standardised scores, because they are influenced by the target school you select in your account. She said that the standardised scores can look different depending on which target school you select. Our one is St Pauls Girls - do you remember what was your target school when you created the ATOM account?
She also mentioned that even around 50% can still be considered a very good score for these CEM tests.
Hope your daughter gets really good grades🌸

Well done your DD! Sounds like she prepped very hard.
my DD found GHS harder than Atom mocks. Her tutor (who works every year with GHS girls) advised that you are not expected to finish it. I guess some exceptionally fast girls do.

my child sat and passed the Cem test for city and Spgs. The Spgs one was as hard in terms of level and timing as the pretest plus tests, but the city test was a bit easier. Many of the spgs candidates use pretest plus, so it’s worth it from that perspective. I would say that the test is incredibly hard, and if you think seeing a low mark may do more harm than good then perhaps stick with atom. It’s possible to pass it without using pretest plus

We used Atom for Blue Coat Liverpool practice. My DS got a standardised score of about 102, but he was getting about 60% right. They said he was on track to pass and he did (although he said none of their VR style questions came up on the actual exam.)
CEM select is not adaptive and there's no penalty for negative answers. I told him to spend no longer than about thirty seconds on a question then make an educated guess at the answer and move on. He finished some sections but not all.
Exam technique is a huge part of passing CEM select.

Hello, please what is a good raw score in the Pretest mock for SPGS? We’ve been using Atom and tried Pretest today which is a slightly different format.

Hi, I don’t remember the absolute raw scores, but they give you a kind of relative score bounding vs others who have taken the test. Performance was variable across the tests (some my child did well others not so well), but ideally you would want to be in the top few bounds. Pretest Cem is much harder than atom, so bear that in mind.