My son is sitting the exams for the above this Saturday. Does anyone have any knowledge of the format of the exams, as the school themselves are very reluctant to give out information. He's well practised in the Letts/GL Assessment multiple choice type papers, but I believe St Ambrose do their own thing. I do know that the papers will be in Maths, VR and English.

Many thanks

Hello,

Yes, St Ambrose entrance exams are GL Assessment based so the Letts/GL Assessment Tests are the correct ones to have done. I also have a student preparing for this school's exam (at short notice)and have also found it difficult/impossible to find out the format for this year's tests. I'll know better after this year - but sorry that's not much help to you now.

As far as I can tell,from past students & friends, Loreto Girls' Grammar uses a similar format to St Ambrose - their (Loreto) Maths Test last year was not multiple choice - more like a KS2 SATs but the Verbal Reasoning and English tests were M/C. Presume you know there is also an English essay (20 mins Creative Writing)to do from a given choice.

Hope it goes well for your son this Saturday.

Thought I'd answer my own post, whilst it's still fresh, in case anyone searches for this next year.

The Ambrose exam 2010 consisted of the following:

Verbal reasoning - 45 minutes, 100 questions, not multi-choice. I saw a similar paper, and it was fairly different to the Chuckra papers, although many of the same types of questions were there. 100 questions in 45 mins sounds a lot, but a lot of the questions are multipart (eg you're given a table of information, and have to answer a number of questions on the info in that table). Quite a few multipart 'logic' type questions - eg ABCDE are five brothers, only A and E are married, Bd and E live in Scotland (the others in England), B&E work on a farm - Which married man lives in England?

Maths - 40 questions in 40 mins, multi-choice, SATS standard then an 'extension question' for those that finished in time - this year it was how many squares (of all the different possible sizes) are there on a chess board, and what is the rule to work out the number of squares on boards that are greater than 8x8. No idea whether/how this forms part of the marking, but presume it must.

English - 76 questions (according to my son, though obviously an unusual number, wonder if he forgot to turn over the last page!) of multi-choice 'vocabulary' questions. 30 minutes only, so they have to work quickly. Each sentence unrelated to the previous. On a similar paper, these start off very easy (The birthday ..... had six candles on it) but progress to a level quite challenging to adults (well this adult at least) such as "The sect's monastic tradition dictated that such .... required secluded penitence" (answer was infringements). Apparently they're not expected to finish/get the last ones.

Finally, there was a 20 minute creative writing test, carrying on from the start of a story provided.

I have been told they like to vary the format, so if this isn't how it is for 2011 then please accept my apologies!

THANK YOU MarkH5096,

That was a VERY useful report back on the St Ambrose exam and I've noted it down. It does sound like they vary the format a bit year to year but that shouldn't really effect the outcome if students are properly prepared.