What Star Wars teaches us about passing the Eleven plus exam

An impossible workload, evil distractions at every corner and never understanding if you are going to succeed.  Master Yoda himself would have a tough time passing the eleven plus exam, so take these Jedi lessons on passing the eleven plus to heart.
It's difficult to use the Force to pass the eleven plus. Threats of turning headmasters to the Dark Side sound hollow and that Jedi mind trick parents have been working on for the past two thousand years doesn't seem to be getting anywhere.

So what's left? Well as parents you should ensure that children use the implicit wisdom and shared experiences of those inhabitants of a galaxy far, far away to improve your child’s eleven plus exam technique, improve the speed of their responses and make sure that they are better prepared than other would be Jedi’s to sit the eleven plus exam.


Jedi Lessons

Lesson Number 1 – Children taking the eleven plus exam (and parents) should think carefully about the child’s most gaping vulnerabilities. Understanding a child’s strengths and weakness is paramount to passing the eleven plus. Parents must not under any circumstances allow those weaknesses to exist on exam day.

Star Wars Moment: Rebels are able to acquire a secret set of plans to the Empire's Death Star and eventually a known weakness is exploited, which destroys the moon-size battle station.


Lesson Number 2 - There's a wealth of value for eleven plus children and parents in listening to the wisdom of others, especially if those experienced Masters have been mentoring students taking the eleven plus for 800 years.

Star Wars Moment: Yoda sagely instructs Luke Skywalker during his training on Dagobah, with guidance such as: "Always with you it cannot be done. Hear you nothing that I say.... You must unlearn what you have learned." Skywalker says that he'll try. "No!" says Yoda. "Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try."


Lesson Number 3 – Using only one type of training or preparation for the eleven plus may sometimes not be enough.  Children and parents should be ready to take guidance from a number of sources, be prepared to be radical with your eleven plus preparation to be better prepared than competitors.

Star Wars Moment: In Episode V, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia and C-3PO are thwarted as they try to get away from the Empire (again) as the Millennium Falcon fails to make the jump to light speed. Damn hyperdrive! Solo makes a bold move and gets creative about hiding out from the Empire.


Lesson Number 4 - There are times when it's a good strategy to be a "fast-follower" rather than the first one to jump to a new or risky assignment. Perhaps another parent has found a good eleven plus learning resource or preparation technique; don’t be too proud to follow.

Star Wars Moment: At the beginning of Episode IV, storm troopers blast through the door of Princess Leia's starship and come charging in. The first ones through the door are killed by Princess Leia's loyal guards, but the followers are not.


Lesson Number 5 – If there' are a number of stars in your local circle who have already passed the eleven plus and they are willing to give advice or take you under their wing, you'd better oblige. In other words: Stay close to the guy who's the "eleven plus Jedi Master" in the family.

Star Wars Moment: As our heroes are about to be pushed into the digestive tract of the all-powerful Sarlacc in Episode VI, Luke instructs Han Solo to stick close to Chewbacca and Lando because, as Luke says, "I've taken care of everything."


Lesson Number 6 - If you have trust in your present tutor or eleven plus exam preparation technique, don't let a rival sway you into another method of learning or to taking on a new tutor if you are not comfortable with their advice.

Star Wars Moment: In Episode VI, during a verbal spat with confused and proud-papa Darth Vader looking on, The Emperor derides Luke Skywalker, claiming that his biggest weakest is his "faith" in his Rebel Alliance friends, and that Skywalker is foolish for not joining the Dark Side.


Conclusion

So the message is clear, if you want to really understand your child’s weaknesses before they sit the eleven plus, be better prepared than others sitting the exam and have access to the best learning resources on the market.  There is an answer - Click Here.

Tip #2: Will it make the boat go faster? !

The achievement of the English Rowing team at world meets including the Olympics are part of the folklore. I recently heard a fascinating story regarding how the team prepared for the Athens Olympics following the failure at the world championships the year before.  As explained by Sir Matthew Pinsent, the whole team which included not only the four rowers, but also the manager, nutritionists, and the boat builders adopted a mantra - a Code they lived by - "Will it make the boat go faster?". Every decision was questioned by this matra and if the answer was "no", then they knew it was not worth doing. They took it to extreme even questioning appearance of the team at the inauguration ceremony of the Olympics ! (because standing for 7 hours would not make the boat go faster).

This may sound as an extreme attitude to take with a child's eleven plus grammar or selective school exams, but consider the following:

• There is no pass mark in the eleven plus exam - It is all comparative so no matter how smart or clever your child is, if they are not in the top few, they don't make it.
• The eleven exam cant be retaken - A child gets only one chance at it and it may decide their fate. Unfair but fact of life.
• There is no syllabus for the eleven plus exam - So you cant really  buy a book and prepare for it.
• There is no access to past eleven plus papers (no matter what your tutor tells you).
• No school provides any guidance on their selective eleven plus exam. In fact most schools pro-actively resist giving any information .
• It is the first real competitive exam for your child. In the current environment of political correctness where even schools sports day are organised so as to "make all children feel equal", this is the first serious jolt of real life.

So all parent who are thinking "I should not be stressing about this", I would urge you to read the above bullet points again, and then search the web to see the performance statistics of a local grammar school and compare it with a local comprehensive.

So given the odds and what is at stake here, perhaps it is not a bad thing to adopt a mindset to achieve success in this exam after all. Discipline is the key. Some things which every parent can adopt or look out for (to make the boat go faster !):

• Time ..time..time. The eleven plus exam is a race against the clock so get your child to do every mock eleven plus exam against the clock.
• Simulate the environment - Most exams require the child to "colour little boxes" on an answer sheet with a pencil. Has your child seen this? Most tutors only use a blank paper and not the kind shown in the figure. Or are they in for a surprise on the final day ! If you need some blank multiple choice filling sheets drop me an email and I have some in PDF format. Also try and find out what format of exam does your school of choice have.
• And don't just practice ! Measure their performance so that you can "fill in the gaps"
• Stay calm and build their confidence, but be realistic when giving them feedback on their performance so that the child is aware that they have a way to go. Make it positive.

Best of Luck with making your "boat go faster" !

Della
http://www.11PlusDIY.co.uk

Are we all born equal (when it comes to eleven plus !)?

Are all children born equal? To the uninitiated, the answer would be a "Yes", but as I am about to tell you, your child's birthday is more than just a day of party popper and funny hats. In the eleven plus grammar school selective system, it probably decides his fate as well !

Whats the Score?
When your child sits the eleven plus exam, the number of questions answered correctly decides the "Raw Score". If there are more than one tests, the score may be the sum of the raw scores. BUT in most cases, this score is not even published by the testing authority and certainly not used for the selection process. What you get is something called a standardized score. A standardized test score is calculated by translating the raw score into a completely different scale. This scale takes into account the pupils age and in some cases length of the test and difficulty levels.

Whats a standardized score?
When a "raw-score" is converted to "standardized-score", it is done with a view that the average score comes as 100. Pupils above average would have a standardized score higher than 100. In statistical terms

this is a normal distribution. The standard deviation here is taken as 15 implying that 68% of the pupils are within plus or minus 15 marks, i.e. 68% of the pupils who sit the test are between 85 and 115 standardized marks. Similarly, 96% of the pupils are within 2SD, i.e. between 70 and 139 marks.

To convert raw scores to standardized scores, the formula is :

S = 15(x - y)/ SD + 100
where S= Standardized score, X is pupils raw score, Y is the average raw score of entire population and SD is the standard deviation which is 15. But this equation assumes that no correction is applied to the raw scores to correct it for age allowance. It is to be noted that percentage scores are never used. This is because percentages do not take into account the average performance or the variations in the scores.

The Age Allowance
To be eligible for the eleven plus exam, the pupil should be born between 01 September and 31 August. This means that the maximum age difference between two children born on these extreme dates is a year. Invariably, the results for the older children are better. The best way to cater for this age variable would be to conduct the test at exactly the same age. Since the logistics of conducting a test on every day of the year are somewhat daunting, the clever professors have come up with an easier way - the age handicap (much like Golf !).  What it really means is that there is a table which is based on empirical data and provides the standardized-age-corrected score given the raw score and the age. Depending on the raw score, the difference between the scores of the youngest and eldest pupil can be as much as 4 marks!

The End Game
The correction for the age allowance means that the youngest and oldest children achieve the same standardized score although the younger children have a slightly lower raw score. At least thats the theory. To make things even more complex, different schools give different weightage to different subjects but thats a story for another day.

Della
http://www.11PlusDIY.co.uk

Is it time?

It struck me yesterday that there are about 90 (and a bit) days left for the first of the 11+ exams for the season. So is it time to start preparing in earnest (and panicking !!) ? I was wondering what other parents were up-to, so I picked up the phone and called a couple of parents from the school to gauge the mood and pulse. The responses I got were - "It's too early to start"...."My kids are busy with the holidays and will start when schools re-open", "I have not thought about it yet"..."Yes of-course. Right", I thought as I put the phone down (that was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek in case you did not get it). That was lesson number one - don't trust the feedback you get from other parents, specially the pushy ones!

So, how do you find out if it is time to panic? Well, there is an easy answer. And like countless times before, the world's largest free-to-use computing network comes to rescue. We all know we can use Google for searching, but did you know that you can use Google for searching what others are searching ? (if that makes sense). Its called "Google Insights". If you look up the search trends for "11 plus papers" on the site, the results show a marked spike in the months of August (as shown in the figure below). You can see the live graph at here.

I expected the results to be seasonal, but the massive spike in the months of August came as a surprise. You will also notice that the spike has been progressively increasing over the last three years implying more and more people are searching for these terms which translates in more applications for these schools, i.e. the competition is getting tougher.

So is it time to panic ? I think the answer is a resounding Yes !

Della

www.11PusDIY.co.uk

Tip #1: If you can measure it, you can manage it !

There is thumb rule in engineering - "If you can measure it, you can make it better". I came across this almost two decades ago while studying for my engineering. The Management consultants have adapted this phrase for the services driven world of today - "You cant manage, what you don't measure". Unless you measure something you don't know if it is getting better or worse. You can't manage for improvement if you don't measure to see what is getting better and what isn't. The Japanese approach - Kaizen or the more widely used Six Sigma, are all based on continuous improvement by continuous measurement.

This old adage is true even for your child's preparation for the 11+ exams. We all know these exams are all about practice and timing. But, do you know if the preparation approach you have taken (tuitions, home tuitions, bond papers, web sites etc) is having the required effect ? I have asked this question to number of parents who are in a similar situation like myself, and the answer usually varies between a blunt "No!" to a blank look as if my question had suddenly set off chain of thoughts. Most tutors do not collect this data either. Some keep a record of the marks but the time is never recorded.

In essence, just attending tuitions and sitting down every day to do papers is not enough. You have to measure your child's performance. This will help you to adapt your preparation style. There are three variables you need to worry about :

• Time - the tests are timed and most children find this element very stressful !
• Marks - the bottom line.
• Marks breakdown by subject.

The good news is that it is not that difficult!. Simple steps like maintaining a record of the marks every time you give your child a bond paper to solve (other papers are available !) is a good starting point. Every time you start a test, make sure your child is timing themselves using the same wrist watch they intend taking in for the exam. After a week you can get the child to plot these marks/ times on a bar graph (which is good practice because bar graphs are also part of the syllabus). Following these simple techniques gets you the measure you need to manage two of the three variable listed above.

There is no easy way to record and measure the third variable, i.e. breakdown of marks by subject. In many ways this is the most important variable. Are you concentrating on mathematics when your child's Achilles heal may be verbal-reasoning ? There is an easy way to find out ! Click here

Della

http://www.11PlusDIY.co.uk