Navigating the new Selective High School test format, what changed, how it works, and what it means for preparation

The NSW Selective High School Placement Test has changed substantially over the past few years, enough that advice, preparation materials, or personal experience from before 2021 may describe a test that no longer exists. The most significant overhaul occurred in 2021, when the NSW Department of Education replaced the General Ability section with a new Thinking Skills section and restructured the test into a Cambridge Assessment-style format. A further change came in 2025, when the weighting across all four sections was equalised. The test has also moved from paper-based to fully computer-based delivery.

For families approaching this process, the gap between the old and new formats creates real confusion about what to prepare and which resources to trust. This article sets out what the current test looks like, what each section assesses, and what the structural changes mean for how preparation time should be spent.

The current test structure

The Selective High School Placement Test consists of four sections, all sat on a single day at a designated test centre on a computer. Students cannot use a calculator or dictionary but are given paper for working out. Reading, Mathematical Reasoning, and Thinking Skills are all multiple-choice with four options per question. Writing requires a single extended response to a given prompt.

| Section | Questions | Time | Weight | |---|---|---|---| | Reading | 38 questions | 45 minutes | 25% | | Mathematical Reasoning | 35 questions | 40 minutes | 25% | | Thinking Skills | 40 questions | 40 minutes | 25% | | Writing | 1 extended task | 30 minutes | 25% |

Format as of 2025. The NSW Department of Education reviews the test periodically, confirm current specifications at education.nsw.gov.au before beginning preparation.

What changed in 2021, and why it matters

The most significant structural change was the replacement of the General Ability section with Thinking Skills. General Ability was a traditional IQ-style assessment, verbal and non-verbal reasoning questions designed to measure innate cognitive ability and resist preparation. Thinking Skills, developed in partnership with Cambridge Assessment, is a different construct. It assesses critical thinking and problem solving: the ability to evaluate arguments, identify reasoning errors, work through novel logical problems, and complete spatial and pattern-based tasks.

The practical consequence is important. Thinking Skills is harder to game through rote drilling, it is not content-based and does not reward students who have simply memorised the most question formats. But it is more genuinely developable than General Ability was. A student who has built real reasoning habits through conversation, puzzles, and analytical reading will perform measurably better in Thinking Skills. The intent of the change was to reduce the advantage conferred by intensive coaching, and the section design reflects that intent. Coaching still exists, and it can help, but it helps students who develop genuine reasoning ability, not those trained to recognise surface patterns in question types.

The 2021 overhaul also extended Writing from 20 to 30 minutes, broadened Reading from 30 to 38 questions, and moved the entire test to computer-based delivery. The shift to computers matters in practice: students read passages on screen, type their writing responses, and cannot annotate text directly as they could on paper. These differences are worth experiencing through the Department's own online practice tests before the actual day.

What changed in 2025, equal weighting

Before 2025, the four sections were weighted unequally. Thinking Skills carried 35% of the total score, Writing carried only 15%, and Reading and Mathematical Reasoning each carried 25%. The consequence was that preparation time migrated toward Thinking Skills and away from Writing, a rational allocation given the marks available, but one that left many students significantly underprepared in the section that, for most students, responds most readily to deliberate practice.

From 2025, all four sections carry equal weight at 25% each. This changes the preparation calculus entirely. A weak Writing performance now costs exactly as much as a weak performance in any other section. A strong one gains equally. For students who had been treating Writing as a supplementary concern, the new weighting demands a genuine reallocation, not because Writing is now more important than it was, but because the scoring finally reflects what good preparation should have prioritised all along.

The section most students underinvest in: Writing is now weighted equally with every other section, and it is the section where deliberate practice produces the most visible improvement. The specific decisions that separate strong writing from average writing at Year 6 level, planning before starting, choosing a less obvious angle on the prompt, varying sentence length, replacing vague words with specific ones, are all learnable and all practisable. A student who has spent equal preparation time on Writing as on Mathematical Reasoning and Thinking Skills will almost always have a stronger combined result than one who has not.

How the profile score works

Entry into a selective high school is not determined by test performance alone. The NSW Department of Education uses a profile score that combines test results with school assessment marks in English and Mathematics, submitted by the student's primary school. A student who performs strongly at school but has one difficult test day is not excluded on that basis alone; equally, a student who performs very well on the test but has significantly weaker school marks will be assessed on the full combined profile.

The system also includes what is known as "wild-score processing", a mechanism that identifies students whose test performance falls significantly below what their school marks would predict, and adjusts the moderation process accordingly. The intent is to prevent a student from being unfairly disadvantaged by illness, misadventure, or similar circumstances on a single day. It does not change the test itself; it changes how anomalous results are treated within the moderation process.

The Equity Placement Model

Since 2021, 20% of places at selective high schools have been reserved under the Equity Placement Model for students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups, including students from low socio-educational advantage backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, students with disability, and students from rural and remote areas. These students sit the same test and are assessed on the same profile score; the difference is that they compete for places within a reserved allocation rather than the general pool.

Eligibility must be indicated at the time of application. Families who believe their child may qualify should confirm the relevant categories on the NSW Department of Education's website before lodging their application.

What the changes mean for preparation

The equal weighting introduced in 2025 makes the answer to "how should preparation be distributed?" straightforward: evenly, across all four sections, with the specific allocation within each section determined by where the student's genuine gaps are. The old logic, spend the most time on Thinking Skills because it is worth the most, is no longer valid. A student who arrives at the test with a significant weakness in any single section is now exposed in a way they were not before.

The Department of Education notes that coaching is not necessary and that the test requires no knowledge beyond the Year 6 curriculum. Both statements are true in a narrow sense, the content is not beyond what school teaches, and the test is not designed to reward students who have been tutored in obscure knowledge. What they do not address is that the skills the test rewards, reading with active purpose, solving multi-step problems without a template, evaluating arguments rather than simply understanding them, writing with control and specificity under time pressure, develop faster and more reliably through deliberate practice than through classroom exposure alone. A student who has done that work will have a genuine advantage over one who has not, regardless of what the Department's guidance says about coaching.

The four dedicated section guides: Each section rewards a different set of skills and requires a different preparation approach. The Reading Comprehension guide covers active reading habits, reading questions before the passage, the inference trap, and how to anchor every answer to the text rather than background knowledge. The Mathematical Reasoning guide covers the distinction between content knowledge and problem-solving flexibility, multi-step problems, and the toolkit of strategies for questions that resist immediate solution. The Thinking Skills guide covers the two components (critical thinking and problem solving), the most common reasoning errors, a three-step approach to novel problems, and why conversation and logic puzzles build the right capacities more effectively than drilling practice papers. The Writing guide covers what markers look for across the three marking dimensions, how to read a prompt carefully before beginning, why planning the ending before starting produces more coherent responses, and what specificity does that vocabulary lists cannot.

At Shoreline, Selective High School preparation starts from where each student actually is across all four sections, because the equal weighting introduced in 2025 means that a strength in one area cannot compensate for a weakness in another the way it once could. Our preparation is built around developing the genuine skills each section rewards: the reasoning flexibility that Thinking Skills assesses, the problem-solving confidence that Mathematical Reasoning demands, the active reading habits that separate retrieval from inference, and the writing control that turns a thirty-minute task into something a marker remembers. The test has become harder to shortcut. That is, ultimately, good news for students who prepare properly.