How exam prep works
Set the exam and the sit date once — the countdown, the weekly plan, timed practice sets and Paper Review all work from it.
On this page
If your child is preparing for an entrance exam — an 11+ this autumn, or Common Entrance at 13+ — there is one place to tell us: Exam prep on your dashboard. Everything else reads from it: the tutors, the weekly plan, the countdown your child sees, and the review of every paper they bring back.
Exam prep is included in PRO — there is no separate exam product to buy.
Setting the exam target
Open Exam prep from your dashboard, or go straight to aitutors.me/dashboard/exam-prep. You set:
- Which exam — chosen from a list of the real tests: the ISEB Common Pre-Tests, GL Assessment, CSSE, a London consortium, a school's own papers, Common Entrance at 13+, and more.
- The sit date — the day your child walks in.
- Optionally, the school or test name and a short note for the tutors.
That is all it is: a date, not a prediction. You can change or clear it at any time, and one target is active per child.
Once set, the target drives three things:
- A countdown — on your dashboard overview, and on your child's own study home, counting down to the day.
- The weekly plan — the tutors weight the week's work toward the examined subjects.
- What the tutors read — every tutor knows the exam and the date, so a session in September is paced differently from one in March.
Which page is which
This page covers the product. For what the exams themselves are — who sets them, when registration falls, what the research says about preparation — see our open guides to the 11+ and the 13+.
Timed practice sets
Exams are sat against a clock, so some of the practice should be too. Your child's study home offers short timed sets: maths speed sets, plus Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning questions.
Every item in a timed set is generated fresh from a seed and marked by code. Nothing is copied from a real paper — the answer key is computed, not transcribed, and no two sets are the same. What repeats is the method, which is the thing worth practising.
The details of what is and is not generated — and why — are on the 11+ page.
Paper Review
Most of the real signal in exam preparation comes from papers your child sits elsewhere — a mock at school, a practice paper at the kitchen table. Paper Review is how that signal reaches the tutors.
Your child brings the tutor the mistakes, not the paper. We never need the paper itself, and we never reproduce GL, CSSE, ISEB or school papers — your child's past papers stay with whoever set them.
For each mistake, the tutor asks your child to place it in one of five categories before explaining anything:
didn't know it · misread it · wrong method · arithmetic slip · ran out of time
Naming the category is itself the diagnostic — a method gap and a slip need entirely different work. Then the tutor walks a similar problem step by step and hands the original back for your child to redo. Never the answer to their own question; that rule holds everywhere in the product.
Every reviewed paper lands back on your Exam prep page, with the mistakes sorted by what actually went wrong — which is a more useful thing to know than a mark.
More practice is not always better
One research finding is built into the product rather than left in a blog post: gains from simply re-sitting reasoning tests level off after about three full sittings. After that, the tutors will tell your child — and you — that vocabulary and reading will move the score more than another reasoning paper would. If a tutor gently steers your child away from a fourth VR set, that is the product working as designed.
What this page never does
We never score how ready your child is, predict a pass, or rank them against other children — anywhere, in either language. We have no admissions data, and a made-up number would only turn a ten-year-old's evening into a verdict. What you get instead is the honest record: which papers were reviewed, what kind of mistakes they held, and what closed.
The 11+ · The 13+ & Common Entrance · Learning plans · Flashcards