Updated: 18 July 2024
The NSW Selective School Test is used to determine entry to selective schools within the state. The standards needed to achieve a place at a selective school, particularly at the top selective schools, are higher than ever. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, over 18,500 students sat the test in 2024, with 4,200 places available. This was the largest number of students to ever sit the test.
There have been a number of changes made to the Selective Test in recent years following a review conducted in 2018. The Maths Test has been made easier, the Reading Test has been made harder and the old General Ability Test has been replaced by the Thinking Skills Test. In addition, the test will move from a paper-based test to a computer-based test for students sitting the test in 2025 and onwards.
While these changes are significant, the core skills required to perform well in the test have not really changed.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the Selective Test, and other similar tests, is that they are about ‘intelligence’. The Selective Test is not about ‘intelligence’. It is about ’thoroughness’. Of course, students require a certain level of cognitive ability to do well in the test, but this is not the issue for most students. The students that perform best and ultimately gain places at selective schools are thorough, both in their preparation and in the way they approach the test. They are consistent in their preparation, they work specifically on their weaknesses, they read the questions properly and they manage their time during the test.
In some ways, preparing for the Selective Test is similar to an athlete preparing for a race. It is a medium to long-term project. It is not something that can be done in a few weeks or a few months.
Just as there are athletes with exceptional talent that can do well in a race with minimal training, there are a minority of students who can do well in the Selective Test with minimal preparation. But the vast majority of students do not fall into this category.
The most effective way to prepare for the test is to do a little bit of work each day over an extended period of time. This allows time for ideas, concepts, habits and techniques to sink in.
Students need to follow a consistent program for at least 1 to 2 years to give themselves a decent chance of performing well in the test. A good time to start preparation is the second half of year 4 following the OC Test, as most students preparing for the Selective Test will have sat the OC Test.
On the topic of the OC Test, it’s important to note that failing to get a place in an OC class does NOT mean that a student will struggle to get a place at a selective school. The OC Test is taken when kids are 9 or 10, while the Selective Test is taken when kids are 11 or 12. Parents often forget that kids’ cognitive abilities will naturally improve as they mature. There is a big difference between a 9 year old and an 11 year old in terms of maturity and development. For example, abstract reasoning is a skill that doesn’t come naturally to many younger students.
The Selective Test has four components: Reading, Maths, Thinking Skills and Writing. These components are not equal in terms of importance. With the way the test is now structured, it is critical to do well in both the Reading and Thinking Skills Tests. Each of the four components will be considered in further detail below.
The Selective Test is about how students can apply their knowledge within a very limited time frame. Time management is a critical part of performing well in the test. Apart from the Writing Test, all of the tests in the Selective Test are solely comprised of multiple choice questions, with each question being worth the same, regardless of difficulty.
If a student spends too long on a difficult question, they might get the next two questions wrong due to lack of time, even if those two questions were relatively easy. In this case, the student would have been better off spending less time on the difficult question (making an educated guess if necessary) to ensure that they get the two easier questions correct. Getting two easy questions correct is more valuable than getting one difficult question correct.
The main benefit of multiple choice tests is that they are easy to administer and mark. However, the Selective Test also needs to be able to distinguish between a large number of students to create the rankings that determine places at selective schools. As a result, the Selective Test will often contain tricks or ‘red herrings’ that are deliberately designed to catch students out. That is, certain questions will have options that look like the correct answer, but which are actually incorrect. Students need to be trained to look out for these red herrings.
The Reading Test is 40 minutes long and has 30 questions. The first and second sections of the test comprise standard comprehension questions, with the first section usually having a fictional stimulus text and the second section usually having a poem as the stimulus text. The third section is usually a non-fiction text where students need to correctly summarise each paragraph. The last section usually comprises multiple texts where students need to match several descriptive statements to the correct text.
When completing the Reading Test, students need to make sure that they read each stimulus text thoroughly before answering the associated questions for that text. This is because some questions will require students to understand the context or ‘bigger picture’ behind the text. It’s more efficient to read the text properly the first time than to re-read the text multiple times.
It may sound overly simple, but the best way for kids to improve reading skills is to read more books, both fiction and non-fiction. Kids that have started reading books from an early age will have an advantage in this regard. Kids should be reading for at least an hour a day. They need to be reading books that are challenging for them, but also enjoyable and interesting for them.
Another benefit of reading books is that it develops focus and concentration. This is an important skill for kids to develop in the digital age, where short attention spans are common owing to the proliferation of mobile devices.
Students also need to make a concerted effort to improve their vocabulary. If a student has a limited vocabulary, they won’t be able to understand the finer details when reading a text. Some questions also directly test vocabulary and subtle differences in meaning between words. Vocabulary books (such as “500 Words You Should Know” by Caroline Taggart) are a useful tool to help kids build vocabulary, but reading widely is still the best way to build vocabulary. Students should also have a physical dictionary and use it to look up difficult words when reading.
If students struggle with a certain text type, then they need to do targeted practice for that text type. For example, poetry is almost always in the Reading Test. Given that very few kids read poetry for leisure, if a student struggles with poetry, then they need to work specifically on their poetry comprehension.
The Maths Test is 40 minutes long and has 35 questions. Questions in the Maths Test cover curriculum areas, such as arithmetic, geometry, probability, measurement, volume and algebra. With the recent changes, the Maths Test is probably now the easiest part of the Selective Test. To perform well in the Maths Test, students should focus on being able to do the fundamentals quickly and accurately.
An important thing to remember about developing maths skills is that, unlike reading, kids generally don’t do much incidental maths in their everyday lives. Most everyday activities require reading in one way or another, so kids naturally do a lot more reading than they do maths. They read when they go to the shopping centre, they read when they watch movies and they read when they play games.
In order to improve their maths skills, kids need to be consistently working through maths exercises, especially for areas in which they are weak. Furthermore, ideas and concepts that they don’t understand need to be properly explained to them.
Maths also consists of several discrete areas which are quite different to each other. It’s not uncommon for students to be strong in some areas of maths but weak in others. For example, a student may be strong in number & arithmetic, but weak in geometry. Consequently, it’s important to understand where a student’s strengths and weaknesses are, so that the weaknesses can be specifically addressed. For the student that is weak in geometry, doing lots of work on numbers will not improve their geometry at all. Targeted practice is required.
Writing out workings is a skill that students need to get in the habit of doing for maths. Many students would prefer to work things out in their head. The problem with this approach is that it is error-prone. The small amount of time required to write out workings for a maths question can be the difference between getting the question right or wrong.
The Thinking Skills Test is 40 minutes long and has 40 questions. It replaced the old General Ability Test and has the most questions of any of the tests in the Selective Test. Due to the time pressure and the nature of the questions in the test, it is probably the hardest component of the Selective Test.
The old General Ability Test was mainly about verbal and numerical patterns, whereas the Thinking Skills Test has a strong focus on verbal reasoning, understanding arguments and problem solving.
The Thinking Skills Test is essentially a reasoning test. There are broadly three components in the test; verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning and logical reasoning. Before starting any work on developing thinking skills, it’s important to ensure that students have strong reading and maths skills, as thinking skills builds on the skills acquired from these areas.
The verbal reasoning component of the test requires an understanding of arguments and identifying mistakes within arguments. This is something that needs to be specifically taught to students, as it’s unlikely they would have learnt this at school or elsewhere. Students also need to do plenty of practice questions once they have developed their understanding of arguments and how to analyse them.
The numerical reasoning component requires students to be strong problem solvers. The questions are essentially ‘hard maths’ problems. To prepare for this component of the test, students need to work on their maths problem solving skills and learn a variety of techniques for solving problems. Strong reading skills really help for these questions, as the most difficult part of these questions is usually converting the words in the question into numbers that can be solved.
The logical reasoning component requires similar skills to the numerical reasoning component. While the problems don’t actually involve numbers, students that are strong in maths and numerical reasoning will have the ability to think logically to solve problems. Again, practice is the key once students have learnt the relevant problem solving techniques.
The Writing Test is 30 minutes long and involves students writing a single piece in response to a stimulus. In previous years, students have been given roughly two pages to write their response. With the move to computer-based testing, it is unclear whether this will still be the case.
The criteria by which students’ writing will be assessed include the following areas:
Each of the above areas will carry a percentage of marks. Accordingly, students need to ensure that their writing is strong in each of these areas. Being strong in one area cannot make up for a deficiency in another area.
For the Writing Test, students should focus on improving the structure, organisation and language used in their writing before trying to improve the quality of what they actually say in their writing.
Students need to be able to write in proper sentences. They need to use paragraphs in their writing and understand the purpose of each paragraph. They also need to write with consistent tense, something that many kids struggle with, as their writing will often switch between past tense and present tense.
As reading and writing are closely related, being a strong reader is a prerequisite to being a strong writer. Everything that was mentioned in the above section on the Reading Test also applies to the Writing Test. If a student has strong reading skills, then they will be able to do well on the Writing Test by learning writing structure and techniques and doing consistent writing practice.
When it comes to writing, one thing to keep in mind is that different students will have different writing styles depending on their personalities. Students should be encouraged to write in a style which suits their personality. For example, some students are more in tune with their more emotions, while others are more logical. These differences will naturally be reflected in their writing.
The change from paper-based testing to computer-based testing in 2025 will affect the Writing Test more than any other test, since students will need to type their responses instead of write them out by hand. Consequently, it is very important for students to develop their touch typing skills. The faster they can type, the more they can write.
Transform learning, transform futures. Book a free trial session with us today.
Book free trial