11+ exam techniques: Five practical tips that work

Most 11+ candidates know the content well enough by exam day. What separates a near-miss from a pass is usually technique on the day, not how many vocabulary lists got memorised in March.

The techniques below aren't about staying calm or thinking positive. They're concrete things your child can do with their pencil, their watch, and the question paper in front of them. Each one is worth practising under timed conditions in the weeks before the test, not introduced for the first time on the morning.

Before the timer starts, your child should glance at the front of the paper and do one quick sum: Total minutes divided by total questions. That gives them a target pace.

GL Assessment sections often run somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour. Question counts and pacing vary by paper and consortium, so check the current GL Assessment spec or your local consortium's published format for the exact figure. As a rough planning illustration: A paper with 50 questions in 50 minutes works out at one question per minute. The headline number is what stops a child from spending three minutes on question 7 and then panicking through the last 20.

Note that the ISEB Common Pre-Test is adaptive, so there is no fixed number of questions per child and the per-question pacing technique applies less neatly. Treat the overall section time as your guide instead (check ISEB's published spec for current section durations).

It also gives them a checkpoint. If the target is one minute per question, they should be roughly at question 25 when the invigilator says "halfway". If they're at question 18, they speed up. If they're at question 32, they slow down and double-check.

If a question is taking longer than the target pace, the answer is almost always to skip it and come back. Many children resist this because they feel they're "giving up". They need a small physical ritual to make skipping feel like a deliberate choice, not a failure.

The pattern is: Read the question, give it one honest attempt, and if you're still stuck after twice your target time, put a small dot or circle next to the question number, leave it blank on the answer sheet, and move on. The dot tells you where to return.

When they come back at the end, they often find the answer comes more easily. Tired brains keep working in the background, and later questions sometimes contain a clue or a word that unlocks the earlier one.

One warning for computer-based papers like the ISEB Pre-Test. Some platforms don't let you skip and return within a section, so check the format with your child's school or tutor. If skipping isn't allowed, the technique becomes "guess quickly and move on" instead.

Most 11+ tests are multiple choice with no negative marking. That means a blank answer is always worse than a guess. But a random guess on a five-option question gives roughly a 20% chance of being right, and an educated guess after eliminating two wrong answers gives closer to 33%.

The technique is simple. For any question your child isn't sure about, they cross out the answers they know are wrong before picking from what's left. Even crossing out one obvious distractor lifts the odds. Eliminating two takes it from luck to a informed bet.

This works especially well on verbal reasoning, where there's usually one option that's clearly off-topic, and on non-verbal reasoning, where two of the five shapes will often break the visible rule.

The instruction your child needs is: Never leave a multiple-choice answer blank. If the bell goes and there are unanswered questions, fill them in with anything. There's no penalty, and even a wild guess scores some marks across a section.

For sections that lean on memorised content, such as vocabulary, times tables, or the rules for cloze tests, a quick brain dump at the start can stop your child from blanking mid-question.

As soon as the invigilator says "begin", your child takes 30 seconds to write down what they know they might forget in the margin or on scrap paper if it's allowed. That might be the times tables they always slip up on (7s and 8s for many children), the rules of the apostrophe, or a short list of tricky vocabulary that came up in practice.

It feels counterintuitive to spend 30 seconds not answering questions, but it pays back several times over. Once the information is on paper, your child doesn't have to hold it in their head while they work, and it removes the panic of "I knew this yesterday".

Check the rules first. Most paper tests allow rough working in margins or on a spare sheet, but some computer-based platforms don't allow any external paper. Your child's school or tutor will know.

Children often want to re-read every answer as they go. That's slow and rarely changes anything, because they're still in the same mindset that produced the original answer.

A better routine is to keep moving through the paper at pace, then use any spare time at the end for a structured check. Two minutes spent on the questions you marked with a dot is worth ten minutes of re-reading questions you already answered confidently.

The check should target the highest-value mistakes. For maths, the question types where careless errors are common: Anything involving negative numbers, units that need converting, or word problems with an "except" or "not" in the wording. For verbal reasoning, any question where they originally narrowed it down to two options and picked one quickly.

Leaving questions on the answer sheet blank is the one thing they shouldn't carry into the final minute. Filling in a guess for every blank takes a few seconds and is the single highest-return action in the last minute of any 11+ paper.

Techniques have to be drilled before they become useful. A child who has been told to skip and return but never practised it under a timer will not do it on the day.

The most effective approach is to do one full timed past paper a week in the eight to ten weeks before the test, in roughly exam-like conditions: A quiet table, a real clock, no parental help mid-paper. After each paper, sit down together and look at where time was lost, which questions were left blank, and which were guessed without elimination. That's where the technique pays off, not in the marks themselves.