What is the 11 Plus Exam pass mark for 2024 entry?
The pass mark for the 11 Plus exams varies heavily depending on the region, school and even the year. Unfortunately, there is no generalised standard pass mark for the 11 Plus. Each school’s pass mark changes every year, depending on many factors, including the average marks scored and number of spaces available.
There is no guarantee that the pass mark of previous years at your chosen school will be the same for 2024 exams.
What is the average pass mark for the 11 Plus?
The average pass mark for an 11 Plus exam is usually around 80%. However, this is just an estimate. The pass mark for each year is decided by the school and/or exam board, depending on many factors. Previous years’ pass marks can often be found on each school's website.
Why is there no standardised pass mark?
There is no standardised 11+ pass mark because it is up to each school to decide its pass mark each year. In most cases, the scores of all students are ranked from best to worse. Places are then awarded starting with the highest scoring student. This means the pass mark changes each year, depending on the mark of the final candidate to be given a place.
In areas with more grammar schools (e.g. Kent), the pass mark is generally lower as there are more spaces on offer, meaning the school can have lower entry requirements. But in highly competitive areas like London (with a high population and fewer grammar schools), there are more children applying for grammar schools per available place. This means the pass mark is often higher. In some areas of London there can be over 30 applicants per place.
It is also important to note that schools in the same county or consortium may have different pass marks — even though they use the same exams. Therefore, your child may pass the 11 Plus exams for some schools but not others due to different minimum pass marks.
What is a standardised score?
Most schools use standardised (or age-adjusted) scoring for the 11 Plus. Again, each school’s pass mark differs each year, broadly speaking, a score of at least 110 is required (in all papers) for a pass.
For the 11 Plus, almost all results are presented as a standardised score. Standardisation is a process designed to help children compete equally by removing all variables from their test scores. It is a complex statistical process that adjusts your child’s score to reflect any age advantage and the difficulty of that year’s exam paper.
This process ensures that older children do not have an advantage, as there can often be a difference of nearly a whole year between the oldest and youngest applicants.
Standardisation also helps to remove any discontinuity from each year’s 11 Plus papers. Schools and/or exam boards try to keep their papers at the same level of difficulty each year, but this is often easier said than done. If there is a year when all students do significantly better or worse than previous years, standardisation prevents more children being offered places than are available at each school.