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Elizabeth Griffin
My daughters tutor Alana has helped her a lot with not only Maths and English but also study skills, essay writing and has boosted her confidence and positive attitude to learning.
Better Tuition Academy
Opportunity Class Test Preparation on
Sydney's Northern Beaches & North Shore
Year 4 students applying for an Opportunity Class in Years 5 and 6
Preparing for the OC test
The Opportunity Class Placement Test is sat by Year 4 students for a place in Years 5 and 6, with applications closing in Year 3. It is three sections in one sitting, and it asks a nine-year-old to work at a pace nothing in their school week has asked of them yet.
That age is the whole design problem. BTA tutors keep sessions short enough to hold a Year 3 student's attention and build the pacing gradually, rather than running a scaled-down version of selective coaching. Lessons run at any of our academies, online, or at home.
For what the test itself contains, read the opportunity class test.
How BTA prepares students for it
Pitched at a nine-year-old
The hardest part of OC preparation is that the candidate is eight or nine. Sessions are built around what a child that age can sustain, which is not the same as what a Year 6 student can.
Reading is most of the maths
Mathematical Reasoning is closer to careful reading than to arithmetic. A student who computes well and reads the question quickly loses marks, so we work on both.
The deadline families miss
Applications close in Year 3, before most families have started thinking about it. We tell you the timeline early, because missing it costs the place outright.
Free to read
Our guides to the OC test
Written by BTA’s tutors, free, and no sign-up.
The Opportunity Class test
The November deadline in Year 3, the three sections, how placement really works, and how to prepare a nine-year-old.
OC Reading
40 minutes across four kinds of text, including a gap-fill passage and poetry.
OC Mathematical Reasoning
35 questions in 40 minutes, and the three errors that recur.
OC Thinking Skills
30 questions in 30 minutes, across its verbal and spatial arms.
Opportunity Class or selective high school?
What the two tests share, what differs, and why an OC place gives no advantage in selective placement.
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Common questions
What families ask about the OC test
They are eight or nine, and that shapes everything about how we work: shorter sessions, pacing built up gradually, and no pretence that this is a scaled-down version of selective coaching. If a child is not ready, we will tell you.
No. Placement depends on the whole applicant pool, and an Opportunity Class is a class inside a public primary school rather than a separate school - so a place may mean a new school and a new commute. That is worth deciding on before you start preparing.
Preparation is charged at our ordinary one-on-one rates, starting at $95 an hour, with no enrolment or admin fees and no lock-in contract. Every rate is on the pricing page, and packages save up to 5% against pay-as-you-go. The 50-hour package requires 1-hour (60-minute) lessons, so it isn't available for primary students, whose lessons are 45 minutes.
Yes, and at the same rate. Lessons run at any of our eight academies across Belrose, Brookvale, Forestville, Mona Vale and Gordon, online, or at home, and you can switch format from one week to the next.
The first session is an informal assessment rather than a lesson. A tutor works out where the marks are actually going, and the plan follows from that instead of from a fixed course every student is put through.
Everything else is on our frequently asked questions page.
Also preparing for something else?
Why we publish
We give a lot of it away
Our tutors write for their own lessons: a breakdown of a set text, a maths paper pitched at one year group, the explanation that finally landed with a student on a Tuesday afternoon. Rather than leave that in a folder at one academy, we publish it.
The English half is free and has been for years. Around 15,000 students a year use those guides, most of them sitting the HSC, and you do not have to be a BTA student to open one. No account, no email address, no payment.
It is not a sideline either. These are the same pages our tutors build lessons from, which is why they are specific about a text or a module rather than general advice about how to study.
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