Quality of 11Plus sample questions

[PlanetEarth]

Hi all!

So we're preparing DD for independent school exams in Jan (no grammars here unfortunately), and as no past papers are available we're using 11+ resources. However, the quality seems to be very variable!

I'm prompted to write this by a free sample non-verbal reasoning she did yesterday, some of the questions she really struggled with. Fine, except OH and I both have PhD's, and we couldn't answer most of the troublesome questions either , the logic used seemed very poor. We've had other examples too where the papers contain errors (e.g. multiple choice where 2 answers are exactly the same), and some where we've disagreed with the correct answer, e.g. 'bride' is to A as 'horse' is to B. DD chose 'wedding' and 'show', which I think is better than the "correct" answer 'groom' and 'cart'. Does a bride drag the groom behind her to the wedding? (No, don't answer that! ).

Anyway, do the companies selling practice papers actually test them? Does anyone have any idea how they compare to real exams? It's a bit worrying, if the real exams have such questions in!

[janinlondon]

What papers are you using? Some of the companies also supply the actual tests (customized) for the schools.

[PlanetEarth]

Really worrying then!

We're using various ones, mostly the free samples but we also bought a book. The NVR paper was IPS, this is the worst one so far. We had one from MW which gave one set of maths answers in the wrong format (I think it was decimal vs percentage), the bride-horse question was from a Bond comprehension book (that test also had another couple of dubious answers, e.g. "What was X most scared of?" answer - "sharks". DD gave a much fuller answer, and indeed no-where in the passage did it say X was most scared of the sharks). There might be other companies whose papers had one or two debatable answers, I dont' remember now.

[pantomimecow]

Our LEA say actual past papers are never supplied to companies.
i have found that some of the questions which could be feasible.

But in the case of the OP Ipersonally think that horse/cart bride/groom very clearly go together whwreas the horse and show combination is a bit dodgy

[exexpat]

I think it's possible to be too bright or creative a thinker for VR/NVR tests. I did a few with my DD (7) recently, and there were some in the NVR reasoning for 7/8 yr olds that stumped both of us.

Eg, there was one where you had to choose the odd one out from a series of five or six animals. DD couldn't decide - should it be the rhino, which was the only one with no fur, or the polar bear, because it was the only one with no horns. There were a couple of other similar ones.

I think with the verbal ones like horse/cart you should probably go with the most obvious knee-jerk answer, but with non-verbal it's often not clear what they're looking for. Perhaps jot down your reasoning underneath - 'no fur' or 'no horns'. Not sure what the markers would do with that though...

[PlanetEarth]

Well I see where you're coming from with the groom/cart, but although they go together I think 'A is to B' works better for wedding/show - "bride is in a wedding, horse is in a show" whereas "bride marries groom, horse pulls cart" (yes I am a pedant ).

Got to watch the kneejerk reactions, for a 'most similar 2 words' question DD chose 'pen' and 'ink' - they are immediately associated in your mind, but not similar. Always have to remember the question.

BTW, if anyone's interested we have found the verbal reasoning papers at chuckra.co.uk to be helpful and non-contentious!

[PlanetEarth]

Sorry, I was wrong about the source of the bride/horse, this was in a sample VR from MW educational.

[MillyR]

PlanetEarth, not all VR papers have the same sort of questions. Bond VR papers are not really of any use if the VR entrance test is written by GL assessment (formerly NFER). You need to know what kind of tests she will be sitting. You can buy 4 NVR papers and 4 VR papers from Letts that are written by GL assessment.

There are several types of VR questions where you match 2 words. The analogy required in a GL assessment paper would be clear in the wording of the question. You would be asked to find an opposite, or a most similar, or make a new word from two. The analogy should be precise.

The answer in the question you mentioned is that in both pairs a new (dictionary recognised) word can be formed from the pairs, so the analogy is precise. Horses at shows and brides at weddings are not really a precise analogy and are really about social knowledge not about reasoning with language. Reasoning tests are meant to reduce social knowledge requirements (although they can never remove them entirely) because social knowledge is considered to be less accurate for predicting future academic performance.

Essentially, VR and NVR entrance exams are similar to CAT tests, not SAT tests.

I have also found mistakes in some papers online, including Chuckra, but Chuckra are suitable for the GL type VR tests.