I completed my first NOMA back in October, but my first OLA today (due to some technical errors with the sound not working). I originally wasn’t too fussed with the idea of a literacy assessment as I’ve always seemed to be rather good with my grammar and punctuation, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of a maths assessment though.

In the end, I got 66% on my first OLA and 85% on my NOMA. This was the complete opposite of what I expected.

The NOMA was quite tricky, even though it’s only primary school level maths. I think I made it more difficult for myself as throughout secondary school, you get a more in depth understanding of maths, you learn how to work out angles and lengths and areas in all new ways. So when you go back to the basics, you try to apply your most recent knowledge to solve the simple task in front of you.

In my OLA, I did well with the spelling, but I realised that I overuse commas and get a bit confused as to which word is a verb or adverb in the sentence. Unfortunately, the answers at the end don’t let you see your performance throughout the Queen’s speech as I would have liked to see my errors there. Maybe this is something that can be introduced in the future.

After seeing my performance on both tests, I will continue to improve my performance and see my improvement through the use of these tests. I will also keep a note of each score as I hope to see a great difference. Maybe one day I’ll even get 100%.