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OC Thinking Skills: 30 questions, 30 minutes
Thinking Skills is the shortest and tightest section of the Opportunity Class Test: thirty questions in thirty minutes, one a minute, with no curriculum content anywhere in it.
Families give it the least attention because there is nothing obvious to revise. That is exactly why it is usually the best hour of preparation available.
Half of it is not words at all
This is the part most parents do not expect, and preparing a child only for "logic puzzles" covers about half the section.
Spatial questions use shapes and solids. Fitting pieces together to make a larger object. Working out what something looks like from a different position. Folding a flat net into a box, or unfolding a box into a net. Matching a view from above to the objects making it.
Verbal questions use short pieces of information and ask what follows: what must be true, what a set of conditions forces, who has reasoned soundly.
A child can be strong at one arm and weak at the other, and most are. The spatial questions are usually the unfamiliar ones, because almost nothing in a Year 4 classroom asks a child to rotate an object in their head and report what they see.
A spatial example
The following is an original question written for this page, not an extract from any real paper.
A solid cube is painted red on every outside face, then cut into 27 identical smaller cubes by slicing it twice in each direction.
How many of the small cubes have exactly two red faces?
A. 6 B. 8 C. 12 D. 27
The answer is C, and the method matters more than the answer because it transfers to a whole family of questions.
A child who tries to picture all 27 cubes at once will usually fail. A child who asks "where can a small cube sit?" will get it reliably, because there are only four places:
- A corner. Three faces exposed. There are 8 corners.
- Along an edge, not at a corner. Two faces exposed. There are 12 edges, one such cube each.
- The middle of a face. One face exposed. There are 6 faces.
- The very centre. No faces exposed. There is 1.
Twelve is the edge count. The switch that produced it, from visualising the object to categorising its positions, is the single most useful habit in the spatial arm. Almost every question of this kind yields to naming the categories and then counting them.
A verbal example
Also original, written for this page.
Four children are sitting in a row. Ravi is somewhere to the left of Tam. Suzy is directly to the right of Ravi. Mei is at one of the two ends.
Which child must be sitting at the far left?
A. Ravi B. Suzy C. Tam D. Mei or Ravi
The answer is D.
Children try to solve these by imagining arrangements until one fits, which burns the minute they have. The faster route is to eliminate.
Suzy is directly right of Ravi, so Suzy cannot be at the far left. Tam is to the right of Ravi, so Tam cannot be either. That removes B and C without constructing a single seating plan. Mei is at an end and Ravi has at least Suzy and Tam to his right, so both remain possible, and the question asks who must be there.
Elimination first, construction only if elimination runs out. That is the working method for every conditions question in the section, and it is worth practising as a method rather than hoping it emerges.
What thirty minutes does to a nine-year-old
The ratio here is the same as the selective test's Thinking Skills paper, but the child is two years younger and has had two years less practice at holding a pace. It shows in a specific way.
A Year 4 student who meets a hard question at number six will often stay with it out of a sense that giving up is not allowed. Four minutes later they have paid for that question with three others they would have answered. The last five questions then go unattempted, and those may have been the easy ones.
So the habit to build is not speed. It is permission to leave. Say it explicitly at home, more than once: skipping is not giving up, it is a tactic, and the examiner cannot tell the difference.
Set a rule and rehearse it. If a question is not moving after a minute, mark it and go. Most children find this genuinely uncomfortable the first several times, which is why explaining it does not work and practising it does.
What goes wrong
Bringing in what they know. The information given is the whole world. An option can be true about real life and still be the wrong answer, and bright children are more prone to this than others because they know more.
Confusing "some" with "most". Some means at least one. It carries no suggestion of typical, common or many.
Rushing the shape questions. Thirty seconds of setting up beats two minutes of staring. Name the positions or the property that changes, then count.
Talking themselves out of the plain answer. When an option looks too simple, children assume a trick. In this section the plain answer is very often correct, because the question asked what follows rather than what is interesting.
How to practise
Sit the full section under the real time limit and on a computer, since that is how the test runs. Then sort every wrong answer into two piles only: got it wrong and never reached it. Those need completely different responses, and a family that lumps them together usually spends the next month on the wrong one.
Because there is nothing to learn, improvement comes from the question shapes ceasing to be new. That is a handful of sections rather than dozens, and the return per hour spent is higher here than anywhere else on this test.
The other sections
Reading · Mathematical Reasoning · The whole test explained · Compared with selective entry
Independent practice material. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the NSW Department of Education. All examples are original material written by Better Tuition Academy.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
- How much of the section is spatial?
- A substantial part of it. Preparing a child only for verbal logic leaves a real gap, and the shape questions are usually the ones they have never been asked to do before.
- My child cannot picture the folded shapes at all. Is that fixable?
- Usually yes, and quickly, because the reliable method is not picturing but categorising: name the positions or the property that changes, then count. Physical objects help at nine, so fold real paper nets.
- Is thirty questions in thirty minutes realistic for a Year 4 student?
- It is tight by design. Most of the lost marks in this section are unattempted questions rather than wrong ones, which is a pacing issue and not an ability one.
- Should we buy a book of logic puzzles?
- Familiarity with the question shapes is what helps, so material matching the section's own formats is worth more than general puzzles, and the Department publishes free practice tests to start with.
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