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The Selective School Test: what is in it, and how to prepare
The selective high school placement test is sat by Year 6 students applying for a place in Year 7 at a NSW selective high school. It is a single sitting made up of four separate components, and most of the preparation families do goes into the one they already know about rather than the one costing them marks.
This page covers what each component contains, what it actually measures, and how to prepare across all four.
The four components
- Length
- 35 questions, 40 minutes
- What it asks for
- Problem solving rather than computation
- Length
- 30 questions, 40 minutes
- What it asks for
- Close reading across several text types
- Length
- 40 questions, 40 minutes
- What it asks for
- Logic and reasoning, no assumed content
- Length
- 1 task, 30 minutes
- What it asks for
- One extended response to a prompt
Two things follow from that table and both matter more than they look.
The first is pace. Thinking Skills gives 40 questions in 40 minutes, which is under a minute each, and it is the component where able students most often run out of time rather than out of ability. A child who knows how to do every question and does not finish scores the same as a child who did not know them.
The second is that three of the four components do not test the Year 6 syllabus. Mathematical Reasoning is problem solving, not the arithmetic a student has been drilled on. Thinking Skills assumes no content knowledge at all. Reading is a comprehension task on unseen texts. So a child at the top of their class can sit this test and find very little of it familiar, and that surprise is worth removing before the day rather than on it.
What each component is really doing
Mathematical Reasoning asks a student to work out what the question is asking before they can start calculating. The arithmetic is usually well within reach; the difficulty sits in translating a worded situation into something you can compute. Students who have practised speed drills often struggle here, because speed is not the constraint.
Reading moves between text types within one paper, and each type wants a different kind of attention. A poem, an information text and a piece of narrative fiction are not read the same way, and switching between them under time is a skill in itself.
Thinking Skills is the least familiar to almost everyone. It rewards a student who can hold several conditions in mind at once and eliminate what cannot be true. Nothing about it is taught in the ordinary curriculum, which is exactly why practice moves the mark so much.
Writing is one task in 30 minutes, which is not long. Planning has to be quick and the response has to be finished. An unfinished piece of excellent writing scores below a complete piece of good writing.
How to prepare
Three things, in order.
Find out where they stand. Sit one full paper under real conditions before deciding anything: one sitting, the real time limits, no help, no phone. Not to get a score, but to produce a list. Most families discover the gap is not where they assumed.
Sort the mistakes. Every lost mark falls into one of three piles: did not know it, knew it and misread the question, or ran out of time. The three need completely different work, and only the first is content. Treating a misreading as a knowledge gap sends a child back to revise something they already knew.
Practise the component that is actually costing marks. This is where families lose the most time. Preparation tends to go into Mathematical Reasoning because it looks like schoolwork, when the marks are going missing in Thinking Skills or in an unfinished Writing task.
The mistake worth avoiding
Doing many papers and marking none of them properly. A paper that is sat and scored tells you a number. A paper that is sat and then gone through question by question tells you what to do next, and only the second one changes anything.
If the same gap keeps appearing across two or three papers, more papers will not close it. At that point the answer is teaching rather than practice.
Where to go next
- Mathematical Reasoning: why strong maths students still find it hard
- Reading: why switching between text types is the real difficulty
- Thinking Skills: the component nobody has seen before
- Writing: why finishing beats polishing
Families preparing a younger child for NAPLAN will find the same marking method works there.
Independent practice material. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the NSW Department of Education. All questions and texts referred to on this page are original material written by Better Tuition Academy.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
- When should a student start preparing?
- It depends far more on where they are starting than on the calendar. Sit one full paper under timed conditions and let the result decide: a student who is close needs familiarity and pacing, while a student with a wide gap in one component needs teaching before more practice will help.
- Is the test the only thing that counts?
- No. Placement also takes account of school assessment, so the test is one input rather than the whole decision. Check the current rules on the NSW Department of Education website, which is the only authoritative source.
- How many practice tests are useful?
- Enough to see a direction rather than a single position, sat a few weeks apart under the same conditions. Two or three properly marked papers are worth more than eight skimmed ones.
- Which component should we start with?
- Whichever one the first full paper says is weakest, which is very often Thinking Skills because nothing in ordinary schooling resembles it.
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