Upcoming 2016 OC test result

http://mathemafix.com

The 2016 OC results will be out in less than 2 weeks. The number of year 4 students on Mathemafix doing OC test has increased a lot over last year. The top performers look extremely competitive. Therefore, we expect very strong performance and a lot of OC placements. While there are parents who combine Mathemafix and attendance at tutoring centres for their kids, the performance of kids who only use Mathemafix and with help from parents look pretty much the same. The difference is that those who did not attend tutoring places had more time for other fun activities.

2016 NSW Selective School results from Mathemafix users

The selective results from Mathemafix users look very strong this year. The highest profile of 256.73 was achieved. It is pretty amazing to see the top student scored just over 90% in raw marks. It is a bit odd to see that this performance plus school marks of around 98% only gave 256.73/300. So the scaling of the whole OC class is in question here. It is also interesting to note that most of the scholarship winners did not even get over 240/300. So this means writing makes a lot of difference in scholarship tests (whereas it makes little impact to selective school test profile). It is also worth notice that kids who had light tutoring or only help from parents were among the best performers. The raw marks and school marks reported by parents reveal a fact that school marks can play a significant role if school marks fall under 90%. Students do get heavily penalised due to internal school ranking. If the school marks are low, they could drag the profile down by 10-15 points even when the raw test marks look really great.

Scholarship results signal strong selective school performance in 2016

Students have achieved 7 scholarships, and among these, 4 are from top private schools. The schools are not named here to avoid privacy issues for the schools and the winners. This is based on the successful writing initiative from end of 2014 where students are encouraged to participate in a collaborative writing forum and using our writing guide as the foundation. They learn from one another and comments given by tutor on the work visible to all members of the forum. The scholarship results from Oct to Feb in 2014 and 2016 clearly show that they are the best trials for the selective test in Mar. A good performance in a scholarship test always translate to a good performance in the selective test. So, it is expected that July will bring back excellent selective school test results for 2016 on the back of excellent OC performance in 2015.

2015 OC results

This is the best ever set of results. While the top student did not achieve highest OC profile of 276/300 of last year, there are a lot more students and great results overall. About 65% of the students achieved OC placements or scores good enough but they only picked schools with too high entry cut-off scores. The performance in the OC test pretty much matches with expectations from OC trials.

A few interesting observations could be seen from the results. When students scored well in the OC test and their school did not give marks, the OC profile is generally better than expected. However, if they scored poorly, the OC profile would be worse than expected. It also looked like in 2015, English difficulty has been brought down a little. This pushed the importance of GA even higher. It would be  possible to do really well just by having a great GA score while English and maths were at the average.

Upcoming 2015 OC test results

http://mathemafix.com

There is a lot of reasons to be very optimistic about the coming OC results. There is a strong growth of membership in OC group. The kids show a lot of strength as they spent 6-10 months on the program. What is really interesting is a chance to compare a kid who has no tutoring whatsoever and others who have tutoring at various places. Yet they came neck to neck on performance leading to the trials and the average of the OC trials look quite close too.

As the kid who did not have any tutoring spent so much time on all parts of the Mathemafix program to enrich knowledge in science, general knowledge, vocab, ... there is a possibility that this kid will score better in the OC test. However the others with tutoring and trials at other places are also very competitive and have an edge in speed.

There is only 7 more weeks until OC results come out.

2015 candidates vs. the past candidates and their OC profiles

NSW selective test performance in 2015

http://mathemafix.com

The results for 2015 look very strong. Out of the students on Mathemafix going for this test, about 1/2 were former OC candidates growing with this website since year 4. They were the strongest and achieved very high performance. Some did not do so well in OC test but eventually got very good selective result. This shows the advantage of following a consistent method over a long period of 2 years. It also shows that the preparation program here is very strong and mature.

The 2015 selective test raw marks show that mathematics is harder this year. English marks look better than last year probably due to the massive emphasis on English here. Students were encouraged to read a lot more, do more English tests, do Wordlist, VocabTest and write as much as they could.

Students also won 3 scholarships and mostly turned them down in favour of excellent selective choices. Again it shows the maturity of the program focusing more on English and general ability.

The raw marks look very impressive. However they also clearly shows how important English is! In this game English and GA provide the bulk of strength for the selective profile.

The averages of selective trials on Mathemafix also show that the trials are positioned very well. If students could reach 90% in trial average, they would be fighting for the top position in the state (about 280/300). So far the highest profile on record is still at 254.92/300 (in 2013).  The highest profile was actually 261/300 (in 2014) but it was from a student who only spent 4 months on Mathemafix so that one did not really count as a real Mathemafix user. The highest profile reported from the public side of Mathemafix (where students did the free trials) is 265.15/300.

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