When I started looking through the reading test questions, I realised it was nothing like the ones we had been practising. I felt like just giving up. It was so hard. The passages we had to read were really long – there was too much to read. And the questions were difficult to understand. Some of the words they were using were very long and I didn’t know what they meant.
I had been worried about doing my Sats this week, especially the reading test. When I woke up on Monday morning I just wanted to get it over with. We got into our classroom and had to sit in silence. Then they brought out the test papers. At that moment I felt nervous and excited. But as I began reading the first text, I felt panic and thought I would never finish.
I was very glad when it was over but worried about how I had done. When it was finished, my teacher, Mr Jones, let us run outside and play “40/40 in” [a game in which players have to try to reach a base]. Some of my friends said they didn’t finish the paper and they thought that they would fail. After that we were all wondering what the pass mark might be. Mr Jones thought it might be low because it was such a hard paper.
I don’t like it how the government has changed the tests and made them harder. I can’t believe the education minister [Nick Gibb], at his age, couldn’t answer a question that we have to be able to answer at 10 or 11 years old. He was given the sentence: “I went to the cinema after I’d eaten my dinner” and he had to say whether “after” was being used as a subordinating conjunction or a preposition. He answered “preposition” but the right answer was “conjunction”.
If I were the prime minister, I would change these tests because they are unfair for year 6 children. I wonder if he knows that the last sentence I wrote was in the subjunctive form.