Selective school cut-off scores in NSW — what's actually published

Are there official NSW selective school cut-off scores?

No — not for the current test, and not as a published list. The department's outcomes page is direct about it:

"There are no set minimum entry scores to receive an offer to a selective high school or opportunity class." — NSW Department of Education, Outcomes (re-verified 16 August 2026)

A school's effective "cut-off" is not set in advance and is never announced. It only exists after the fact — it is simply the placement rank of the lowest-ranked student who accepted an offer at that school that year — and it moves every year with four things: how many students apply, how they perform, how many places exist, and how many offers are declined. There is no fixed pass mark to publish, so the department publishes none.

The only official per-school numbers that ever existed were published by the NSW Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation (CESE) as an open-data set of minimum entry scores out of 300, under the old scoring system. That dataset's last entry year was 2021. Its URL now redirects to a generic landing page (accessed 1 August 2026) — it has been withdrawn — and long-standing aggregators that mirrored it were asked by the department to take their score pages down. So the table below is a historical record, not a current cut-off list, and we label it that way throughout.

Last officially published minimum entry scores

These are the final officially published per-school figures: 2021 entry, on the retired 300-point scale, with the prior year (2020 entry) alongside so you can see how much a single school moves year to year. They come from the withdrawn CESE minimum-entry-score dataset, archived by Global Education Academy (accessed 1 August 2026), which cites the Department of Education as source. Of the 48 physical Year 7 selective sites, 43 have a published figure; the remaining five are listed underneath with the reason none exists.

Source: NSW CESE "selective high schools minimum entry scores" open-data set (last entry year 2021, now withdrawn), archived by Global Education Academy, which cites the Department of Education. Figures are minimum entry scores out of 300 under the retired scoring system. Year labels are entry years. Accessed 1 August 2026.

The five schools with no published figure

• Farrer Memorial Agricultural High SchoolTamworth · Fully selective · boardingBoarding agricultural entry ran through a separate process; never listed in the CESE minimum-score tables.
• Yanco Agricultural High SchoolYanco · Fully selective · boardingBoarding; not present in the CESE minimum-score tables.
• Leppington High SchoolLeppington · Partially selectiveOpened around 2023 — after the last published-score year.
• Richmond Agricultural CollegeRichmond · Partially selectiveBecame partially selective in 2022 — after the last published year (2021).
• Sydney Secondary College, Blackwattle Bay CampusGlebe · Partially selectiveSenior campus (Years 11–12); Year 7 selective intake runs through the Balmain and Leichhardt junior campuses.

One provider sits outside the 48 physical sites: Aurora College, the statewide virtual selective school for rural and remote students, showed a 2021 minimum of 160/300 in the same historical tables. Opportunity Class per-school minimums were published the same way, to the same 2021 cut-off, and withdrawn the same way — so exactly the same rule applies: any current OC "cut-off by school" is an estimate, not an official figure.

Why the Department stopped publishing cut-offs

Two things happened at once. First, the scoring model changed. The test is now four components — Reading, Mathematical Reasoning, Thinking Skills and Writing — each counting for exactly 25% of the placement score, with no school-assessment component and no single section able to carry a weak one (placement procedures PD-2002-0006, accessed 1 August 2026). Raw section marks are statistically scaled to remove differences in question difficulty between sittings, then combined into a single rank. The old out-of-300 figures simply don't map onto the new model.

Second, the department stopped publishing per-school minimums entirely. The CESE open-data set was withdrawn after 2021 entry, and the outcomes page now states plainly that there are no set minimum entry scores. The reasoning follows from what a "cut-off" actually is: a number that only exists retrospectively and moves every year. Publishing last year's figure as if it were this year's target would mislead more than it informed.

Note one thing the current documents do not state: a maximum possible placement score. You may see the current score described as "out of 120" — that denominator belonged to the 2022 transitional model, which still included 20 points of school assessment. Since the school-assessment component was removed and the four test components equalised to 25% each, no official document states a current denominator, and the department does not release raw placement scores at all. Anyone quoting a current "out of X" per-school cut-off is quoting a number the department has never published.

How the placement score works now

Performance bands, not a mark

Families never see a raw placement score. What arrives is a comparative Performance Report (accessed 1 August 2026) placing your child in one of four bands per component — top 10%, next 15%, next 25%, or lowest 50% of that year's candidates — plus an outcome. The department is explicit that "the performance bands do not show the percentage of correct answers your child achieved": it's a statewide comparison, not a mark out of anything.

Reserve list: bands A to F

If the outcome isn't an outright offer, it may be a reserve band. Bands A through E are "likely" to receive an offer eventually, and the Department publishes each as a calendar month-end rather than a countdown from your outcome — band A by the end of September, B by the end of October, C by the end of November, D by the end of December, E by the end of January — while Band F is "unlikely." Our selective reserve list guide sets both scales out in full, with the elapsed-time conversion clearly labelled as ours rather than the Department's. Reserve movement continues until the end of Term 1 2027, the term your child would start Year 7; after that, any late vacancy runs through the separate Years 8–11 entry process instead. One detail that catches families out: declining an accepted offer to chase a reserve spot elsewhere is final — "if you choose to decline your offer, you cannot get it back again."

The Equity Placement Model — up to 20% of places

At every selective school and opportunity class, the first 80% of places go out purely on placement-test rank. The remaining 20% is reserved across four equity groups — students from low socio-educational-advantage backgrounds (10%), Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students (5%), rural and remote students (2.5%), and students with disability (2.5%) — provided their test performance sits within 10% of the general cut-off for that school. It's additive, not a lowered bar in isolation: any equity place left unfilled goes back to general applicants. In 2025, 369 students gained a selective place this way (UNSW Sydney, December 2025, citing the department's own fair access page).

The gender-balance rule, from 2027 entry

From 2027 intake, every selective and partially selective high school — and every opportunity class — offers an equal number of places to boys and girls. Entry within each gender pool still runs strictly on test rank; nothing about the test or the scoring changes. The trigger was a widening imbalance: coeducational selective high schools sat at 58% boys / 42% girls and opportunity classes at 60% / 40% by 2025. Every student sitting the May 2026 tests is in this first cohort (NSW Government, November 2025).

How to sanity-check any cut-off number you read

Plenty of coaching and test-prep sites publish confident-looking tables of "2024" or "2025" cut-offs by school, sometimes tiered into "Tier 1 / Tier 2," sometimes labelled "out of 300," sometimes an invented "out of 120." None of them trace to a department source, because none can — the department publishes no such list. Before you trust any figure, run it through four quick checks.

The one thing you can genuinely act on is the statewide picture — how many students chase how many places — which the department does publish, and which we show next.

How competitive is it?

With no per-school data published, the honest number to look at is statewide: how many students are chasing how many places, year on year.

Source: Dr Bruniges' Independent Review of the 2025 Opportunity Class and Selective High School Placement Testing (NSW Department of Education, July 2025), Appendix 3 — Figure 1 and Table 1. Accessed 1 August 2026.

Selective High School places have barely moved — 4,200 to 4,250 for six years running — while applications climbed from 14,536 in 2020 to 18,545 in 2024 before easing to 17,559 in 2025, around 4.2 applicants per place. Opportunity Class places have been frozen at 1,840 since 2021 against 13,000 to 15,500 applications a year — 7.2 applicants per place in 2025. As the review puts it: "on average across 2020–2025, there were nearly 4 applications for every Year 7 SHS entry place, and nearly 8 applications for every Year 5 OC entry place."

Results day, and what arrives instead of a score

Selective outcomes were released on 19 August 2026. Opportunity class outcomes are still to come, on 9 September 2026 — and the Department still carries that one under a column headed "Date (expected)", so it remains a date to plan around rather than a promise. One wrinkle if you go looking: both the Selective High School placement timeline and the Opportunity Class placement timeline still say only "placement outcome released: Term 3 2026" (accessed 16 August 2026). For what results day itself involved, see our selective test results guide.

Some history worth knowing: the test date itself has moved later in the year — it sat in March as recently as 2022, and shifted into May from 2025 as part of the move to computer-based testing — yet the August release timing has held steady across that change. It's also worth knowing why 2025 needed an independent review: the 2 May 2025 sitting was badly disrupted at three large Sydney venues, prompting Dr Michele Bruniges' Independent Review (July 2025). One recommendation — smaller, local test centres rather than a few giant metro venues — has already been adopted for 2026.

What happens after results

An offer, or a spot on the reserve list

Accepting your first offer doesn't automatically end things — you can hold it while staying on the reserve list for higher-preference schools until the "reserve decision date," at which point you're removed from every other list automatically. Reserve movement keeps running until the end of Term 1 2027; anything unresolved after that shifts to the Years 8–11 entry process for late vacancies. Weigh a decline carefully: once you decline an offer, it's gone for good.

If it's a no this time

An unsuccessful result this round isn't a verdict on selective education generally, and it doesn't carry over between programs. Opportunity Class and Selective High School are entirely separate tests with entirely separate applications, two years apart — a child who misses an OC place sat in Year 4 gets a completely independent shot at the Selective High School Placement Test in Year 6, with nothing about the earlier outcome following them into that round. The rules can also move between one sibling's turn and the next — the gender-balance change above is a good example.

Cut-off score questions, answered honestly

Preparing for the test itself

You can't control where a school's rank lands in any given year — but you can control how ready your child is for the test that sets it. Our selective test preparation guide walks through a sensible plan, and our free Selective practice test online covers Mathematical Reasoning and Thinking Skills one subject at a time, sat in a player built to mirror the real Janison screen — no account required. If you're new to the whole process, start with the NSW Selective Test guide.