The problem with photocopied prelim papers

[blurboy1985]

Sharing this in case it helps another P6 parent.

We’ve been doing the usual prelim paper grind — the photocopied sets everyone passes around. Two papers most weekends. I thought more practice was just… good.

Problem is, most of those papers only give a final answer. “Ans: 24” and nothing else. So when she got something wrong, neither of us knew why. I’d mark a cross, she’d feel lousy, we’d move on.

It hit me during a speed question. She got the answer “wrong”, I marked it, she nearly cried. When I actually sat down and worked it out, her method was fine — she just slipped converting minutes to hours at the very end. One careless line.

But for weeks I’d been telling a kid who understood speed that she was bad at it, because all I had to compare was a final number.

So we changed things:

Fewer papers, but we go through every wrong one until she can re-solve it herself.
I look at the method, not just the answer — a careless slip and a real gap are different problems.
She needs to see the steps, not just the answer, to find where hers went off.

The slightly obsessive part: I started collecting the real 2025 prelim papers from the top schools and working through every solution properly so she’d always have steps to check against.

It grew bigger than planned and I put it online — one full paper, Ai Tong P6, is free, plus a short no-signup sample:

https://sgmathsexam.com/

But the link’s not really the point.

The point is: if your child practises without proper worked solutions, you might be marking them wrong when they were right. Check the method.

Happy to work through any P6 maths question here if your child’s stuck.