11 Plus Score Calculator

How to use this calculator

1. Enter cohort statistics if you have themSome consortia publish the mean and standard deviation after results. Without them the calculator uses a rough linear mapping, which is much less accurate.
2. Use the published weightingsThey vary widely — some schools weight English and maths equally, others weight verbal reasoning heavily. The admissions arrangements state them.
3. Leave the third paper blank if unusedSet its weighting to zero and it is ignored. Two papers is the common pattern.
4. Treat the result as an estimateReal standardisation uses the actual cohort figures for that year, which nobody knows in advance.

Standardisation compares children, not papers

A raw mark means nothing on its own, because it depends entirely on how hard the paper was. Sixty per cent on a difficult paper may represent a much stronger performance than eighty per cent on an easy one.

Standardisation fixes that by expressing every mark as a position relative to everyone else who sat the same paper. The cohort mean becomes 100 and one standard deviation becomes 15 points.

So a child scoring exactly the average gets 100. One standard deviation above gets 115, which is roughly the top 16%. Two standard deviations above gets 130, roughly the top 2%.

That conversion makes papers comparable. A standardised 118 in maths and a standardised 118 in English represent equally strong performances even if the raw marks were 45 and 32.

It also means the pass mark is fundamentally about rank, not knowledge. A pass mark of 121 is asking for roughly the top 8% of the cohort, whatever the papers happened to contain.

Age standardisation is the second adjustment, and it addresses a real unfairness. Children sitting the same test in September can be up to eleven months apart in age, and at ten years old eleven months is a meaningful fraction of a life.

The adjustment gives a small uplift to younger children and a small reduction to older ones, calibrated so that on average birth month does not predict outcome. Different providers use different scales, and most do not publish them.

Weighting comes last. Where a school uses several papers, the admissions arrangements state how they combine — commonly 50:50 for English and maths, sometimes with verbal or non-verbal reasoning weighted separately.

The weighting matters more than parents expect. A child who is strong in maths and weaker in English does much better under a 50:50 scheme than under one weighting English at 70%.

All of which is why a raw mark, on its own, tells you very little about whether a child has passed.

Worked example: 42 in English, 38 in maths

Take English 42 out of 50 with a cohort mean of 32 and a standard deviation of 8, and maths 38 out of 50 with a mean of 30 and a standard deviation of 9. Both weighted 50%.

English: the child is 10 marks above the mean, which is 10 ÷ 8 = 1.25 standard deviations. Standardised, that is 100 + 15 × 1.25 = 118.75.

Maths: 8 marks above the mean, which is 8 ÷ 9 = 0.889 standard deviations. Standardised, 100 + 15 × 0.889 = 113.33.

Weighted equally, the combined score is (118.75 + 113.33) ÷ 2 = 116.04.

Against a pass mark of 121, that falls short by about 5 points.

Notice what happened to the raw marks. In percentage terms the child scored 84% in English and 76% in maths — a 8 point gap. After standardisation the gap narrowed to 5.4 points, because the maths paper had a wider spread of marks and was therefore discriminating more finely.

That compression is standardisation doing its job.

Now change the weighting. If English were weighted 70% and maths 30%, the combined score becomes 118.75 × 0.7 + 113.33 × 0.3 = 117.12 — a point better, because the child is stronger in the more heavily weighted paper.

At 30:70 the other way it falls to 114.96. The same performance, a three point swing, purely from the scheme.

Now age adjustment. If the child is six months younger than the cohort median and the scheme adds 0.5 points per month, that is 3 points, taking the score to 119.0. Still below 121, but closer.

A summer-born child can gain several points this way, and it is a deliberate and reasonable feature rather than a quirk.

Finally, the interpretation. A score of 116 is about 1.07 standard deviations above the mean, which places the child in roughly the top 14% of everyone who sat the test. That is a strong performance that may still not secure a place, which is the uncomfortable reality of selection where places are limited.

What standardised scores mean

Assuming a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Most standardisation caps the range at roughly 69 to 141, so a child at the very top of the cohort will often show 141 regardless of how far ahead they actually were. That ceiling matters where several children tie at the cap and a tie-break rule decides places.

Pass marks, catchment and what the score does not decide

The pass mark is not fixed in the way parents often assume. Where a school admits a set number of children, the effective mark is wherever the last available place falls — so a strong cohort raises the bar and a weak one lowers it.

That means a score that would have secured a place last year may not this year, and comparing against historic pass marks is only a rough guide.

Some areas use a qualifying score rather than a rank. A child who reaches the qualifying score is eligible, and places are then allocated by distance, catchment, sibling links or other oversubscription criteria. In that model, exceeding the qualifying score by a wide margin gains nothing.

Others rank purely on score. Others again use banding, taking a set proportion from each ability band to produce a comprehensive intake.

Several consortia operate a single test across multiple schools with different pass marks for each, so the same score can qualify for one school and not another.

The practical implication is that the admissions arrangements for the specific school are the document that matters, and they are published every year. General advice about the 11 plus is frequently wrong for any particular area.

On preparation: familiarisation with the format is worth doing, because a child meeting an unfamiliar question style under time pressure performs below their ability. Beyond that, the evidence on heavy tutoring is mixed, and the tests are increasingly designed to be tutor-resistant precisely because coaching advantages were seen as unfair.

What consistently helps is reading widely, mental arithmetic fluency, and working under timed conditions so the pace is not a surprise.

On appeals: where a child narrowly misses, most authorities have a review or appeal process. Grounds vary but typically include illness on the day, a significant error in administration, or evidence that the result does not reflect the child's ability. An appeal is not simply a request to reconsider the mark.

A final point worth making plainly. A standardised score measures performance on two or three papers on one morning. It does not measure a child's ability, their potential, or how well they will do at secondary school, and the correlation between 11 plus performance and eventual outcomes is far weaker than the weight placed on the day suggests.

Assumptions and limitations

• An estimate only — real standardisation uses that year's actual cohort figures
• Without cohort mean and SD, it falls back to a rough linear mapping
• Assumes a normal distribution, which real mark distributions only approximate
• Age adjustment scales are not published by most providers
• Does not model minimum scores required in individual papers
• Does not account for catchment, sibling or other oversubscription criteria
• Pass marks move with cohort strength where places are limited

Questions people ask about this in United Kingdom