2021 Selective School and Private School Scholarship Test Preparation

This blog entry will inform members of the Selective Support group on important issues related to the 2021 Selective Test and scholarship tests to take the heavy load away of the internal message board.

In 2021, it is expected that the selective test will have graded questions where harder questions get more marks. They want to bring this in the same way they have done with the NAPLAN. What this means is the hard-working students won't be able to beat more intelligent students who also work moderately hard. It will be more about quality than quantity of work.

The NAPLAN test has been changed in 2019. It is now a lot harder in English reading and even the maths is a bit harder. As a lot of students who are placed at the arrow (beyond band 8 for year 5) still fail a lot of questions, it is expected that the average students actually fail to get 50% raw mark in the English test.

School marks for public school students is a problem for many because there is no standard for giving the marks across schools. While each school at least has one teacher trained about OC program, they have different ideas about how to give the marks. And not all schools take this seriously. So, the marks remain a problem. The scaling process is supposed to fix this problem but it does not do a good job. If teachers give marks under 85% to OC students, it will negatively them. Students in Catholic schools enjoy having no school marks and this helps those who score high in the selective test to get the higher selective profile. Even for students who only score average selective test marks, they still get an advantage over public school students who get school marks under 80%. What this means is that Catholic students should not enter public schools and hope for better selective test profiles! The other way around is actually more likely to give a higher selective profile.

So, what are things to worry about for students in 2021?

1/ Read a lot and try to improve English vocab and comprehension. In 2019, a lot of students who could read at 85% in year 6 (and 80% in year 7) could only get 35%-45% in selective English reading test. A High Distinction in ICAS English would only point to 75%-80% in selective English reading test.

2/ For school marks, students should worry about English vocab and writing. NAPLAN test is in May and the writing part is often the weakest part for students from Non-English-Speaking Background. It's likely that more schools will do online NAPLAN.

3/ Students in OC classes are expected to face hard English across vocab, reading and writing. OC teachers are likely to pay more attention to writing.

4/ ICAS tests have gone online. UNSW Global has decided to push their REACH program (old ICAS) in the place of the old ICAS. The ICAS program is moved to Aug-Sep and only done online. Many schools have decided to stop participating in ICAS or reduce to only English and Maths. Those who wish to have many ICAS results as part of the effort to apply for private school scholarships will have to seek alternatives.

To improve English, students should read a huge variety of texts and do quizzes. On Mathemafix, they get access to a Reading Library. They also should access the free service ReadTheory.Org for English reading and quizzes. On ReadTheory.Org, students should aim to reach average grade 9.

There are two new modules to help students. The first one is called Personal Wordlist. Students collect new words during their review of English test results and they can learn these new words deeply using this new module. This effectively allows students to re-use English test results as a source of learning to improve both vocab and English comprehension. The second module is called English Comprehension. This module allows students to revisit past English tests and write their own answers for questions and then check against the multiple choices to improve their ability to write short answers at school. This also help improve the ability for boys to do the Sydney Grammar scholarship test.

To improve maths, students should cover all year 6 school maths quickly to get the foundation then work on maths problem solving. On Mathemafix, students have access to Maths Lessons videos. Students should quickly cover year 6 using the document Maths Lessons guide and then later use the Maths Problem Solving Strategies Year 4-5 (and then 6-7) to improve maths problem solving skills. There are challenging maths series to help students prepare for Maths Olympiad competition. For this purpose, students should start early to hope for reaching top 10% in the Maths Olympiad competition.