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Thinking Skills: 40 questions, 40 minutes
Thinking Skills gives 40 questions in 40 minutes. It assumes no content knowledge at all, resembles nothing a student meets in ordinary schooling, and for those two reasons it is usually where preparation pays back fastest.
It is also the component most families spend the least time on, because it does not look like schoolwork and there is no obvious thing to revise. This is one of the four components of the selective school test.
What it actually tests
Reasoning, held under time. A question typically gives a set of conditions and asks what must be true, what cannot be true, or what follows. Nothing has to be recalled. Everything has to be worked out.
That makes it unusual: there is no syllabus to fall back on and no way to be under-taught. A student is either used to this kind of thinking or they are not, and the only route from one to the other is doing it.
The question types
What must follow. A short argument is given and the student picks the conclusion that is definitely supported. The trap is an option that is probably true in the real world but is not established by the passage.
Find the assumption. An argument has a gap in it, and the student names the unstated thing it depends on. The test is whether the argument collapses without the option chosen.
What weakens or strengthens. New information is offered and the student decides which piece damages or supports the case.
Arrangements. People, days or positions with a set of conditions, and a question about who or what goes where. These are solved by elimination rather than by trying every possibility.
Spot the flaw. Reasoning that sounds fine but contains a specific error, often treating something that sometimes happens as something that always happens.
A worked example
The following is an original question written for this page, not an extract from any real paper.
Every student in the school choir also plays an instrument. Some students who play an instrument are in Year 6. Nadia plays an instrument.
Which one of these must be true?
A. Nadia is in the choir.
B. Nadia is in Year 6.
C. Some choir members play an instrument.
D. Every student who plays an instrument is in the choir.
The answer is C, and the reason is worth going slowly over, because it is the reasoning the whole component runs on.
The first sentence says everyone in the choir plays an instrument. That is a one-way street. It tells you nothing about whether an instrument player is in the choir, so A and D both reverse the direction and fail.
B fails because "some" instrument players are in Year 6, and Nadia may be one of the others.
C survives because the first sentence guarantees it: if every choir member plays an instrument, then certainly some do.
Notice that C is the option that feels least like new information. Students reject it for being obvious. In this component the answer that merely restates what you were told is very often the correct one, because the question asked what must be true rather than what is most interesting.
The time problem
Under a minute a question is the tightest ratio in the test, and this is where able students most often run out of time rather than out of ability. The failure mode is specific and predictable: a student meets a hard item early, refuses to leave it, and never reaches the last several questions, which may well have been easier.
A blank at the end of a Thinking Skills paper is almost never a reasoning problem. It is a pacing problem, and it is fixed by practising the decision to move on rather than by getting better at logic.
The mistakes that recur
Importing outside knowledge. The passage is the whole world. An option can be perfectly true about real life and still be wrong.
Reversing a conditional. "All A are B" does not give you "all B are A". This single error accounts for a remarkable share of wrong answers.
Treating some as all. "Some students" means at least one, not most, and not every.
Rejecting the obvious answer. As above: what must be true is often modest.
Why practice moves this mark
Because unfamiliarity is doing most of the damage. The first time a student sees this style of question under time, they are learning the format and answering it at once, and the format alone costs them. By the third paper it is just questions.
That is a large improvement available for a small amount of work, and it is the reason we would tell most families to look here before anywhere else.
How to practise it
Sit a full component under the real time limit. Mark it against the solutions, and for every wrong answer decide whether the reasoning was wrong or the clock was. Those need different work.
If it was the clock, practise abandoning questions. Set a hard rule: if it is not moving after a minute, mark it and go. Most students find this uncomfortable, but it is worth more marks than any other single habit in this component.
The other components
Mathematical Reasoning · Reading · Writing · All four explained
Independent practice material. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the NSW Department of Education. All questions are original material written by Better Tuition Academy.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
- Can you revise for Thinking Skills?
- Not in the sense of learning content, because there is none. You can become fluent at the question types, which has much the same effect on the mark.
- Is it an intelligence test?
- It is a reasoning test, and reasoning under time improves with practice like anything else. Treating the first score as fixed is the mistake.
- How much practice is enough?
- Until the format stops being a surprise and the pacing habit holds. That is usually a handful of papers rather than dozens.
- Why does my child get the hard ones right and the easy ones wrong?
- Usually because the easy ones look too easy, so the obvious answer gets talked out of. Reading the question again rather than the options is the fix.
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