11 Plus Mock Exams Plan- at home
Before the mock 11 plus day
Set a date and time about a week before hand. This helps to deliver the necessary sense of anticipation.
Try to find a good routine during the week. Plenty of rest , eat properly, don’t over -do the revision, stay relaxed.
Set up a totally quiet room for the day as close to exam conditions as you can. Your local exam will have rules on blank paper/ clear plastic wallets for pens etc- make sure you know what these are ( they do differ).
Make sure you start bang on time.
Administering the 11 plus mock exam
Essentially you want to make this as realistic as possible, if they need to go to the loo during the test then give no extra time, call out half time, ten minutes to go and five minutes to go.
Children on the day will often have to sit two or more papers. Make sure you do as close to the actual test as possible.
Marking the mock papers
Do this as quickly as possible and sit down and go through a feedback session.
It is quite normal for children to struggle more on a properly structured mock exam than they do during individual test papers.
Discuss the issue of stamina with your child including any pressure they felt, it will help them to adjust and cope with the day itself.
Sometimes for confidence it is worth doing a second mock day- children will often do much better second time around because they are more familiar with the process.
Where you see lots of little mistakes creeping in this will be a function of the pressure of the day coupled with the time demands of the mock exam itself. It is these mistakes which will be the difference between success and failure on the day. Anything you can do to further embed core skills or help them to develop attention to detail and checking skills will be of great help.
11 Plus Mock Exam Papers – Recommendations
For school written Exams.
In some cases schools publish past exams to give you a chance to work on the real thing. Beware though that sometimes these not full papers or do not include all the disciplines. Where school written papers are available we suggest you use them if you can as they will provide the most realistic approach- beware though that sometimes are not provided.
Non- CEM 11 Plus Test Schools ( GL or School Written Tests)
We’d suggest the following papers- most packs contain four papers so there’s really no option but to buy perhaps more than you may need. Alternatively if you have some left over from weekly work then use those for the mock exams:
GL Assessment Papers Multiple Choice Maths ( use pack one or pack two)
GL Assessment Papers Multiple Choice Verbal Reasoning ( use pack one or pack two)
Non- Verbal Reasoning
GL Assessment Papers Multiple Choice Non-Verbal Reasoning ( use pack one or pack two)
GL Assessment Papers Multiple Choice English ( use pack one or pack two)
For Schools Using CEM Tests
CEM 11 Plus Tests currently test all four disciplines ( Maths is called Numerical Reasoning, English Comprehension is combined into Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning)
CEM tests typically feature two tests of 45 minutes each, each paper will contain a selection of each questions from the disciplines. So you might for instance find a Verbal Reasoning question followed by a Maths question, Followed by a comprehension exercise followed by some Non-Verbal Reasoning.
The papers below are good examples of these sorts of tests. CEM have never issued actual specimen papers so these publishers have built their tests around what is known about the test. These will be the most accurate simulations of what the exam might actually be like and so are best used for this Mock exam process.