The Gifted Education Programme (GEP) in Singapore - Part 3 of 4

The result is out (some schools may distribute it on Monday)! Are you surprised, excited or disappointed? If your child has been selected to sit for the GEP Selection Test, congratulations! Regardless whether he/she will clear the Selection Test or not, he/she is clearly the top 10% in his/her cohort. This group, we generally classified as High Ability Learners.

If your child is not selected to take the GEP Selection Test, take this as an exposure for your child and move forward. Focus on the upcoming final year exam, which has a weightage of 50%, is more important. Not all children will be very good in English and Math anyway.

This year, the GEP Selection Test will be carried out over 2 days - 18 and 19 Oct. As per usual practice, they fall in the PSLE Marking period of 4 days so that the selected children could congregate in selected schools to sit for the test together.

Yes, your child will be assigned to a school near your neighbourhood to sit for the test. The test centre is highly unlikely to be your child's school. If the number of students passing the GEP Screening Test is high, his/her school will charter school bus(es) to ferry the children to and fro the test centre (this will happen in popular primary schools). If the passing rate is low in that school, then please be prepared to send and fetch your child yourself.

For your information, while the Screening Test papers are marked by your child's school teachers (that explains why your child's school has a good idea whether your child will clear the Screening Test or not), the Selection Test papers are marked by Ministry of Education (MOE) Gifted Education Department itself. So, in this aspect, the 'secrecy' level could be pretty high. The results of the Selection Test will only be disclosed in 1st week of Nov before the schools close for year-end holiday. Your child's teachers will not know of the result until the school receives the envelopes (for the students) that very day.

So what kind of questions or format of the test would your child be expecting? In the Selection Test, General Ability Test (GAT) will come into picture. This GAT for Primary 3 (P3) is unlike the GAT papers which you could find in the Internet. The P3 GAT papers are specially crafted by MOE's GE department (but I'm sure they would also source from somewhere and tailor them to suit P3s)

The first day, that is, 18 Oct, is the English paper. Your child will sit for the English paper in the morning then, have a half-hour break (yes, please pack in snack for your kiddo), and resume English GAT paper after that. If school bus is chartered, your child will be sent back to his/her primary school. If no school bus is chartered, you will have to arrange to pick him/her up at the test centre. All in, be prepared to have lunch past 1pm.

The second day is the Math paper. Again, your child will sit for the Math paper in the morning then, have a half-hour break (pack in snack), and resume Math GAT paper after that. Then, chartered school bus will send your child back to school or you arranged your own pick-up. Expect lunch to be later than the day before because duration for Math papers is longer than English paper.

The format for the English paper is the same as the one in Screening Test - Vocabulary, Cloze Passage and Comprehension. The Vocabulary questions are purely multiple-choice questions, but this time round, there will be 5 choices to each question instead of 4. The Cloze Passages will be lengthier than those in Screening Test with no helping words. The Comprehension is also a multiple-choice section. It will be lengthier (the passage is usually 3 pages long) and there will be 5 choices to each question now.

The Mathematics Paper is 1 hour 30 min, it is broken up into 2 sections. Section A is multiple-choice questions. There are, again, 5 choices to each question. Section B is short problem sum questions.

The GAT papers for both subjects are multiple-choice questions with 5 choices to each question to choose from.

You may also like to know that there will be some questions thrown in just to test the child's standard but no marks will be given. This is one safe way the MOE GE department use to test the 'academic intelligence' of the children and to introduce new questions (because they cannot keep recycling old ones).

To spice you up a bit, do test yourselves these Maths GA questions, and see if you can answer them in shortest time possible.

The Selection Test results should be out by 1st week of Nov, after the final year exam and before the school holiday commences. I will blog about the final instalment on this topic after the result is out. Do stay connected via my Facebook Page or Google+ for updates. For more information about GEP, please read up on MOE's website.

All the Best!

The first and second instalments on this topic are here:
GEP Part 1
GEP Part 2