Transfer Test* Support* AQE 2016-2017

Bambi1980

Hey - just wondering how everyone feels re the Easons booklets? My DD's scores in them are way below how she scores in past AQE papers and other booklet tests school is doing. I am giving her one at the weekend but worried it will knock her confidence if she is scoring low in them. Is this the case with anyone else? They seem quite old style and I know her teacher doesn't rate them, saying they are more like the former transfer test. Maybe two tests a week in school at this stage is enough???

Carebear82

Yes Bambi1980 I found that with Eason's booklets my DD always scored lower and was knocking her confidence so I have stopped giving them to her. I like the transferni.com test papers as they are in same format as the actual AQE papers but she has finished all of them so I don't know what to give her at moment. She is doing 2 actual past AQE papers in school every week so i'm now going through ones she is getting wrong and doing up my own similar questions for her to do then when I get time i'm working through the transferni revision booklets which are fab but is there any other tests similar format or should I stick with giving her Eason's booklets again. She is still low to mid 70's in marks but I really hope she has been given hard tests lately so im hoping they will give her easier ones in school few weeks before to boast confidence! she is getting 47/48 past few weeks out of 64 I just need her to get over 50 mark!

Mumof3boysNI

Bambi1980 wrote: »

Hey - just wondering how everyone feels re the Easons booklets? My DD's scores in them are way below how she scores in past AQE papers and other booklet tests school is doing. I am giving her one at the weekend but worried it will knock her confidence if she is scoring low in them. Is this the case with anyone else? They seem quite old style and I know her teacher doesn't rate them, saying they are more like the former transfer test. Maybe two tests a week in school at this stage is enough???

Hi,
I think the CEA Eason's booklets are definitely harder! My son usually scores at least 5% lower in the tests compared to AQE papers. Personally I like that they are more challenging. My son knows not to worry too much about his marks when we do these tests but I do feel they stretch him and offer something a bit different to the work he does in school.

Carebear82

So does anyone have a list of what past papers are easy and what papers are hard from 2009 up till 2015? Just so I can judge how my daughter is doing?

May100

Bambi
Our school is doing 2 tests per week. I tried to give an Easons one at the weekend but DS wasn't very focused so I decided to stop extra home tests. He was getting fed up so time to ease off, Instead he wants just to work through some questions with me and watch how I would approach them. He said he learnt a lot from watching me do some questions - like underlining important bits of information, approach to maths etc. All things to save him and decrease chance of errors. I also made him a maths checklist to pick up silly mistakes.
I used some of the Belfast telegraph freebie questions. In relation to Easons found maths ok but comprehension hard esp in the books 21 onwards. Also Easons have 58 questions that seem to be 58 marks but for same amount of questions AQE gives 64 marks. So if in Easons you have a 4 part question you get one mark but in AQE this would be worth 2 marks.

May100

Carebear
We haven't done them all yet. So far my lowest marks were in 2010 paper 2 and 2011 and 2014 paper 3s
His best scores so far were in 2011 and 2012 paper 2s and 2014 papers 1 and 2.
Not all children had the same experience though. So many of the mistakes are careless ones rather than hard questions.
Got familarisation day details through - so the end is in sight!

Carebear82

Yeah our familiarisation is Sat 22 October scary so near!

Bambi1980

Good to know others are having the same experience with the Easons tests. I'm reluctant to purchase anything else at this stage and feel that the best option could be to just go over all the wrong ones from past papers as they all seem to come up again and again.

Re which past papers are harder - from our experience it really does depend. DD scored so much lower than her peers who she is usually around the same as in one of them - no rhyme or reason for it - teacher just said some suit some children while others suit others. She has told them that the 2015 were especially difficult so DD has already decided her score will drop when she gets them! Think they probably even out across the three each time but probably one paper harder in there though how that really benefits the process I don't know as it will get discarded anyway?!?

Bambi1980

Mumof3boysNI wrote: »

Hi,
I think the CEA Eason's booklets are definitely harder! My son usually scores at least 5% lower in the tests compared to AQE papers. Personally I like that they are more challenging. My son knows not to worry too much about his marks when we do these tests but I do feel they stretch him and offer something a bit different to the work he does in school.

In the last one she did - test 12 - DD scraped 50%! soooo much lower than the school past paper marks so 5% lower sounds very impressive to me! I did tell her I would be concerned if I thought it was a problem and she could see I wasn't so settled a bit. Sigh!

Mumof3boysNI

Hi Bambi1980

Why don't you just take her through the paper as revision to build up confidence? If she is doing two papers a week in school I think that's plenty. I wouldn't worry about the marks others are scoring, as I've said previously, it's only the good results people talk about. My son is scoring very well in the AQE past papers, mostly (but not always) in the 90s. His teacher says she hopes he gets a very high score, but we will see! He does need more than 110 though as he would like to go to Friends' and he doesn't go to the prep so needs to score high! There are some children in his class scoring 50-60% in AQE papers, and other children who will score anything from the 90s one day down to 50% in the next!! The class average is usually around the 75% mark. So I think that should equate to a score of around 100 in my mind. Obviously I'm speculating here!