You've bought the practice papers. The answer booklet is sitting on the kitchen table. Your child has just finished their first proper attempt, and now you're staring at a page of ticks and crosses wondering what any of it actually means.
This is the bit nobody explains. Plenty of advice tells you which papers to buy and why timed practice matters. Almost none of it tells you what to do once the paper is done and your child has gone off to watch telly. So let's fix that. Marking a practice paper well is a skill, and doing it badly can either panic you or lull you into thinking everything's fine when it isn't.
Mark it the same day, with your child there if you can
The temptation is to mark the paper later, quietly, once they're in bed. Resist it. The marking is where the learning happens, and a cross your child never sees is a cross they'll get again.
Sit down together while the paper is still fresh in their head. Go through it question by question. For every wrong answer, the goal isn't to make them feel bad. It's to work out one thing: did they not know how to do it, or did they know how and slip up? Those are completely different problems, and you treat them differently. A child who doesn't understand how to find a percentage needs teaching. A child who understood it perfectly but misread "how many were left" as "how many were sold" needs to slow down and read the question twice. Lump those two together and you'll waste weeks teaching something they already know.
Keep the tone light. If marking turns into an interrogation, your child will start hiding their mistakes, and a hidden mistake is the most expensive kind.
Work out the raw score first
The raw score is just the number of questions they got right. If they scored 38 out of 50, that's the raw score. Simple enough.
Turn it into a percentage too, because percentages are easier to compare across papers of different lengths. Thirty-eight out of fifty is 76 percent. Forty-two out of sixty is 70 percent. Without the percentage, you'd think the second result was better because the number's bigger. It isn't.
Write both numbers down somewhere you'll keep, with the date and the paper name. One result tells you almost nothing. Six results over two months tell you whether your child is climbing, plateauing, or going backwards on tired weeks. The trend is the thing you actually care about, and you can only see it if you've been recording it from the start.
Why you can't calculate a real pass mark at home
Here's where a lot of parents tie themselves in knots. They get a raw score, then go hunting online for the magic number their child needs to hit. The honest answer is that you can't work out a true standardised score from a practice paper, and you shouldn't try.
The real exam doesn't use raw scores to decide anything. It converts each child's raw score into a standardised score, usually on a scale running roughly from 70 to 140, where 100 is bang average. That conversion adjusts for two things you have no access to at home. One is the difficulty of that specific paper, because a hard paper and an easy paper can't be compared on raw marks alone. The other is the age of the child, since a summer-born child gets a few marks of allowance against an older one in the same year group. Your kitchen-table practice paper has no conversion table, no cohort to compare against, and no way of knowing how hard it was relative to the real thing.
So what do you do with the raw score? Treat it as a rough fitness reading, not a grade. As a loose rule, a child consistently scoring around 80 percent or above on good-quality timed papers is in healthy shape for most selective areas. A child sitting around 60 percent has work to do, but you've got time, and that's exactly what practice is for. Don't read a single 65 percent as a verdict. Read ten papers as a direction.
Look at the pattern, not just the total
The score is the headline. The interesting story is in which questions they got wrong.
Group the crosses by type. On a verbal reasoning paper, are the mistakes clustered in the cloze questions, or the letter sequences, or the word-meaning ones? On a maths paper, is it the long multi-step word problems eating them alive while the straight arithmetic is fine? Sort the errors like this and a shapeless paper full of red turns into a short list of two or three weak spots. That list you can actually attack. That list is worth more than the score at the top.
Watch where in the paper the mistakes appear, too. If the first thirty questions are clean and the wheels come off at question 35, that's not a knowledge gap. That's a timing and stamina problem, and the fix is pacing practice, not more teaching.
The mistakes parents make when marking
The first one is marking too generously. Your child writes 47 when the answer is 74 and explains they "just wrote it the wrong way round." On the real exam, 47 is wrong. Mark it wrong. Soft marking gives you a soft picture, and the exam won't be soft.
The second is moving on too fast. You find a wrong answer, tell them the right one, and flip the page. But telling isn't teaching. Have them redo the question themselves, out loud, until they can get there without you. If they can't reproduce it five minutes later, they haven't learned it.
The third is marking every paper as if it's the final. Early on, a practice paper is a diagnostic tool, not a judgement. Would you weigh yourself ten times a day and panic at every wobble? Same idea. Let the trend do the talking.
FAQ
How often should my child do a full practice paper?
In the early months, one full paper a week is plenty, with shorter focused sessions on weak topics in between. Closer to the exam you can build up to two or three, but doing a paper a day burns children out fast and the scores stop improving. Quality of marking matters more than quantity of papers.
Should I mark spelling and handwriting on an 11 plus practice paper?
For multiple-choice reasoning and maths papers, no, mark only whether the answer is right. For written English or creative writing tasks, spelling, punctuation and clarity do count, so flag those, but go gently. The marking on the real written papers is holistic, not a spelling test.
My child scored low on one paper. Should I be worried?
Not on the strength of one paper. Children have off days, some papers are harder than others, and a single result is noise. If the low scores form a pattern across several weeks on the same topic, that's your signal to focus there. One bad Tuesday isn't.
Do practice paper scores predict the real 11 plus result?
Loosely, and only if the papers are good quality and properly timed. A child consistently scoring well under exam conditions is in a strong position. But practice papers can't replicate the pressure of the real room or the exact question style of your region's board. Treat a strong practice record as encouraging rather than a guarantee.
Marking papers by hand is fiddly, and keeping track of the trend across weeks is exactly the bit most parents drop. ReadyFor11 does that part for you. It scores your child's practice automatically and shows you which question types are dragging them down. It tracks progress over time, so you can see whether they're really improving or just having a good day. It's free to use, and you can start at readyfor11.co.uk.