SGChess Blog #6 – Our Thoughts after the National Junior Squad Sorting Assessment

Recently, the SCF Training and Development team conducted a “sorting assessment” for all of our NJS trainees. The purposes of this assessment is to group players of similar levels in the various training squads. All the students had 60 minutes to answer 15 questions. 14 of these 15 questions are focused on various important chess concepts, while the last question was to test a player’s general knowledge about famous chess players.

Below, you can find a review of the questions used in the paper, the right answers, the general answers submitted by our trainees and the typical issues they faced.

You can also download the PGN file here: NJSExamReview

Rather alarmingly, many of the students were only able to know the names of famous and viral chess youtubers and streamers but they did not know of some of the best chess players in our history, such as Robert James Fischer, Garry Kasparov, Judit Polgar or even Magnus Carlsen.

This is very similar to a young football player who has never heard of Pele, Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo but knows who is IShowSpeed.

Overall, it is clear to our trainers team that many of our young trainees lack general but important chess knowledge. We encourage all our trainees to read as much as they can at home for their self study. SCF has a well-stocked chess library where junior members can borrow and use at their leisure and this would go a long way to help our young trainees to not only better their technical skills, but also train their ability to learn independently.