Something worth explaining to your child prior to sitting the eleven plus exam...

The final exam results are ‘standardised’ which means that the results are adjusted to take things like age and difficulty of the actual test paper compared to previous years’ papers into account. Therefore, your score may actually go up or down depending on how well you do in comparison to everyone else taking the test this year. There are only a set number of places in grammar schools so if everyone does really well on the test paper all of the scores will be adjusted down slightly, so that only the required percentage of students passes the test. The same happens if the test is really hard and everyone gets a very low score, the scores will be adjusted upwards slightly to ensure that the required percentage still passes.

Therefore, all you need to do is realise that if the test paper seems really easy, please make sure you work as accurately as possible to ensure you get the highest mark you can without making any careless errors as it is likely the scores will be adjusted downwards if the test is easy. Likewise, if the test paper seems really tricky, stay calm, as it is very likely that everyone is finding it tricky so keep working through the paper as best you can to score as well as you can since the scores are likely to be adjusted upwards.

Many students end up getting their higher result on what they felt was the harder paper because the results got adjusted as has just been explained.