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The ACER scholarship test: four sections, one sitting, several schools
ACER's Cooperative Scholarship Testing Program is the most widely used of the three scholarship tests in Australia, with around 150 participating independent schools. Before assuming it is the one your child will sit, confirm it with the school, because two other providers are in common use.
What is in it
At the Year 7 entry level, four sections:
Reading Comprehension
- Time
- 45 minutes
Mathematics
- Time
- 40 minutes
Written Expression
- Time
- 40 minutes
Abstract Reasoning
- Time
- 40 minutes
Around three hours in total, pencil and paper at a test centre rather than on a computer, and typically sat in late February for entry the following year.
Confirm the current structure with ACER before you prepare against it. Levels and timings do change, and a paper described on a coaching website is not the same authority as the provider's own page.
The cooperative part is the point
The name is not decoration. One sitting can support applications to several participating schools. One fee, one Saturday, one result distributed to the schools you nominate.
Families who do not know this sometimes register more than once, or quietly rule out a second school because they assume it means a second test and a second fee. Neither is necessary, and it changes the arithmetic of the whole exercise.
Confirm that each school on your list accepts the cooperative result, because a minority run their own arrangements alongside it.
The date that catches people
Registration opens months before the test. For a late-February sitting, registrations commonly open the previous September.
That gap is where opportunities are lost. A family that decides in January to try for a scholarship usually finds registration has closed. Work backwards from the registration date, not the exam date.
Abstract Reasoning is the section to look at first
It is the one that looks least like school, and for that reason it is where familiarity buys the most.
There is no curriculum content in it at all. It is pattern work: sequences that continue, analogies between shapes, odd-one-out from a set, matrices with a missing cell, coded transformations, and shapes rotated, reflected or folded.
A capable child meeting those forms for the first time under time pressure loses marks to unfamiliarity rather than to ability. That is entirely fixable, and usually in a few sessions rather than a term. The goal is not to become clever at patterns; it is for none of the question shapes to be new on the day.
Two habits carry most of it. First, decide what is changing between the given figures before looking at the options, because the options are built to suggest changes that are not there. Second, check one property at a time, in a fixed order, rather than trying to take in the whole figure at once.
Mathematics is mostly reading
The arithmetic is usually within reach. The difficulty is translating a worded situation into something calculable, and then answering the question that was actually asked.
The recurring losses are consistent: answering a slightly different question, missing a change of units partway through, and failing to read a diagram that carries information the words never repeat.
A useful check at home is to take the questions your child got wrong and ask them, without solving anything, to state in one sentence what each was asking for. On roughly half of them they will now state it correctly. Those were never mathematics errors.
Reading Comprehension moves slowest
Forty-five minutes, and the longest section. It reflects years of reading, so a few weeks of practice improves technique at the margins without changing the underlying level.
The technique worth having: for every answer, be able to point at the words that prove it. The most common wrong answer in any comprehension section is a reasonable conclusion the text does not actually state. It may well be true. It is not what was asked.
Written Expression is where the movement is
Forty minutes, marked by a person against a rubric, and the section that responds fastest to preparation in the months available. It has its own page here, because there is more to say about it than fits alongside the others.
The short version: finishing matters more than polishing, and under time pressure the ending is the first thing to go.
Practise on paper
The test is pencil and paper at a test centre. A child who has done all their practice on a screen will find handwriting for forty minutes a different physical task, and will not have rehearsed the pacing of a paper-based section where you cannot jump around as freely.
Sit at least one full three-hour paper in one go before the day. Stamina is a real factor at this length and it is the one thing shorter practice cannot rehearse.
Where to read more
Which scholarship test is your child sitting · Written Expression in detail
Independent practice material. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ACER. ACER and the Cooperative Scholarship Testing Program are ACER's own. Structures, timings and dates were checked against published material at the time of writing and do change; confirm anything you are relying on with ACER and with the school.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
- Can one ACER sitting cover more than one school?
- Often yes, which is the main practical advantage of the cooperative program. Confirm each school you are applying to accepts the result.
- When do registrations open?
- Commonly around September for a sitting the following February. That deadline, rather than the exam date, is the one families miss.
- Is the test on a computer?
- It is a pencil and paper test at a test centre, so practise on paper.
- Which section should we work on first?
- Abstract Reasoning, usually. It is the least familiar, uses no curriculum content, and gives the largest improvement for the least time.
- How long is the whole thing?
- Around three hours across the four sections. Sit at least one full-length paper in one go beforehand, because stamina is part of what is being tested.
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