Practice · NSW Selective Test

NSW Selective practice tests 2027 — start free, no signup

Ten real Mathematical Reasoning questions are below, and your child can start the first one now — no card, no account, not even an email address. They are taken from one of our full papers and run easiest first, so a cold start is not a wall. Below them, this page sets out what the Selective Test covers, how to turn a practice paper into a proper rehearsal, what to do with it afterwards, and the preparation mistakes that quietly waste a term.

Verified August 2026 Format and dates checked against the Department of Education's own pages.

What the NSW Selective Test covers

The Selective High School Placement Test is sat by Year 6 students in early May, for entry to a selective high school the following year. It runs as four separately timed sections on one day, with breaks between them — about two and a half hours of testing in total. No calculator is allowed in any section.

Section	Questions	Time	Weight
Reading	17 questions, some with several parts (38 answers in all)	45 min	25%
Mathematical Reasoning	35 questions	40 min	25%
Thinking Skills	40 questions	40 min	25%
Writing	1 task, typed	30 min	25%

Source: NSW Department of Education placement test and practice test pages, and the Department's 2025 methodology review for the weightings (accessed July 2026). The equal 25% weighting is recent — for the 2024 sitting, Mathematical Reasoning carried 35% and Writing 15%. Our guide to Selective Test scoring sets out the whole calculation, including why families never see a raw score.

Reading

Forty-five minutes, 17 questions, several of which have multiple parts — 38 answers in total. The section is not a comprehension worksheet: it mixes a prose extract, a vocabulary cloze, poetry, a gapped-text passage where paragraphs must be slotted back into place, and a multiple-matching set across several short texts. Children who read widely still trip over the formats, because the formats are the point.

Mathematical Reasoning

Thirty-five multiple-choice questions in 40 minutes — a little over a minute each, with five options per question and no calculator. It samples number and operations, patterns and algebra, measurement, geometry, and statistics and probability. This is the section the ten questions above are drawn from. The maths itself sits inside the primary syllabus; the difficulty comes from the reasoning wrapped around it and the clock.

Thinking Skills

Forty questions in 40 minutes, four options each. This is the section parents can least help with directly, because it does not look like schoolwork: logic puzzles, deduction from a short passage, spotting the flaw in an argument, numerical patterns, spatial reasoning. It rewards familiarity with the question families more than any body of knowledge.

Writing

One typed task in 30 minutes. The Department's own sample prompts are not "write a story" — they specify a text type, a purpose and an audience, such as an advice sheet for new students or a newspaper report. There is no published marking rubric. Since the 2025 sitting it carries the same 25% as every other section, which is a bigger change than most preparation plans have absorbed. See our Selective Test writing guide for the official prompts and practice topics.

It is a computer test, and the screen is half the challenge

Every sitting since 2025 has been fully computer-based. Your child sits at an assigned test centre, on a device the Department provides, running the Janison test platform. There is no paper booklet, no answer sheet to shade in, and nothing to bring but themselves.

That changes what practice needs to look like. A printed paper does not teach a child how to pace themselves against a clock in the corner of a screen, how to flag a question and come back to it, how to read a diagram they cannot annotate, or what the last two minutes feel like when eight questions are still unanswered. Those are learnable habits, and they are learnable in a couple of sittings — but only if the practice happens on a screen.

It is also the one advantage available to every family for nothing. The Department's own online practice tests run on the real engine and cost nothing at all. Our papers run in a player built to mirror the same screen, which is the entire reason we build them online rather than as PDFs. For a walkthrough of the real interface, see the computer-based Selective Test guide.

What ten questions can and cannot tell you

A short taster is good for one thing in particular: finding out, in five minutes and without committing to anything, whether these questions look like what your child can already do. That is a genuinely useful signal, and it is why the questions sit at the top of this page with nothing in front of them.

What ten questions cannot show you is pacing, and pacing is most of what makes the real section hard. Thirty-five questions in 40 minutes is a little over a minute each, with no calculator and no going back once time is up. Children who can solve every question in the book still lose marks to the clock, and the only way to find that out is a full paper under time.

That is what our full papers are for: the complete 35 questions in 40 minutes, sat in a player built to mirror the test-day screen, auto-marked, with a worked explanation for every question in the review screen. One paper in each subject is free for 24 hours — Mathematical Reasoning, Thinking Skills and Reading. Those do ask for an email address, because access runs for a day and we send you the link so you can come back to it. If you would rather not hand one over, the Department's own free online tests are in the table below, and they are good.

Every genuinely free source of practice, compared

There is more free, legitimate practice available than most families realise — starting with the Department's own material, which you should use first. Here is how each source stacks up.

Source	What you get	Format	Marking	Cost
The ten questions above	Ten real Mathematical Reasoning questions, taken from one of our full-length papers.	Current. Answered in the browser, in the same style as the test-day screen.	Marked on the spot, with a worked explanation for every one.	Free. No signup, no card, nothing to download.
Our full practice papers	One full-length paper per subject — Mathematical Reasoning, Thinking Skills and Reading — sat online at the real question count and time limit.	Current. Built to mirror the test-day screen: countdown clock, flag-for-review button, question-by-question flow.	Auto-marked, with a worked explanation for every question in the review screen.	Free for 24 hours. These do ask for an email, because we send you the link.
Department online practice tests	Several short computer-based practice tests per subject (four for Mathematical Reasoning, three for Thinking Skills, counted 27 July 2026), on the real test engine.	Current. The official Janison player used on test day — the closest free thing to the real interface there is.	Marks each answer right or wrong straight away and lets you reopen questions, but shows no worked solutions.	Free, official, no signup. Sit these first.
Department sample tests (PDF)	Three complete sample tests, each covering all four sections, with answer keys and an explanation-of-answers document.	Older paper format — the Department states these "do not reflect the current test format". Good for question styles, not for the screen.	Full answer key, plus written explanations for Reading, Mathematical Reasoning and Thinking Skills.	Free to download, no signup.
"Free" coaching-site downloads	Usually the same official Department PDFs — occasionally an older edition — re-hosted behind a form.	Same paper format as the originals, sometimes a retired version.	Varies. Often a bare answer list, sometimes none.	Free, but gated behind an email signup you did not need to give.

The Department's material lives on its practice tests page (the PDF sample tests) and at se-practice.au.insights.janison.com (the online tests) — both free, official, and worth doing before anything else (accessed 27 July 2026). For the full breakdown of what is in each official paper, see our Selective Test past papers guide.

Turning a practice test into a real rehearsal

A practice test, a mock and a trial test are the same idea under different names: a rehearsal of the real thing under similar conditions. What makes any of them worth the afternoon is not the label — it is whether you run it like the real sitting. Four things make the difference:

One section, timed, uninterrupted. Set the real time limit, start the clock and leave the room. You are trying to find out how your child copes alone under time, which you cannot observe while sitting next to them.
Same time of day as the sitting. The real test runs in the morning. A child who is sharp at 4pm is not the same child at 9am, and that gap is worth knowing about in advance rather than on the day.
On screen, not on paper. The interface is part of what is being tested. A rehearsal on paper skips the timer, the flag button and the click-through flow your child has to manage while also doing the maths.
Review the whole paper together afterwards. The score is the least useful output. The mistakes, the lucky guesses and the questions they never reached are the lesson.

One caution worth stating plainly: a full mock is tiring, and doing one every weekend from February is a good way to produce a child who resents the sight of the test. Two or three full rehearsals per section across the whole preparation period is plenty. The rest of the time is better spent on the specific question types that went wrong.

What to do after your child sits one

Most of the value in a practice test is created in the hour after it finishes, and most families skip that hour. A workable routine:

Leave it for a bit. Marking a paper the second a tired child puts it down turns a useful review into an argument. Later that day, or the next morning, works better.

Sort the wrong answers into three piles. Questions they did not understand, questions they understood but got wrong under time, and questions they never reached. These need completely different responses: the first is a content gap, the second is a technique or accuracy problem, and the third is a pacing problem. Treating all three as "needs more practice" is how a term disappears without much changing.

Have your child explain two or three of them back to you. Reading an explanation is passive; reconstructing the reasoning out loud is where it sticks. If they can talk you through why the right answer is right and why the tempting wrong one is tempting, that question type is done.

Pick one thing to change before the next paper. Not five. "Answer every question even if you guess", or "do not spend more than two minutes on anything", or "read the last line of the question first". A single specific habit per paper is what actually carries over.

Do not compare scores across papers too seriously. Practice papers vary in difficulty, your child varies by the day, and a three-mark swing means very little. Trends across several papers mean something; individual scores mostly do not.

Six preparation mistakes worth avoiding

None of these are unusual. Most of them come from advice that sounds responsible and turns out to be expensive in time, money or goodwill.

Practising on paper for a computer test
Worksheets and printed PDFs still have their place for teaching a topic. But the thing that catches children out on the day is the interface — a countdown clock in the corner, a flag button, a grid of question numbers, and no way to scribble in the margin. If every hour of practice happens on paper, the format is a surprise exactly when it can least afford to be.
Doing papers without ever reviewing them
A completed paper with a score at the top and nothing else has taught your child almost nothing. The value sits in the questions they got wrong, the ones they guessed correctly, and the ones they never reached. Reviewing one paper properly is worth more than sitting the next three.
Starting a year out at full intensity
Most families we hear from begin focused practice three to six months before the test. Longer helps some children and flattens others, and a child who is sick of the whole thing by March is in a worse position than one who started in January. Intensity is not free.
Treating Writing as the section to skip
Writing was weighted 15% for the 2024 sitting. From 2025 it carries 25%, the same as every other section. It is also the only section where a child cannot guess, and the one most often left until last. Thirty minutes, one typed task, a quarter of the score.
Chasing a cut-off score
The Department publishes no per-school minimum entry scores, and has not since 2021 entry. Preparing against a number someone has reverse-engineered from a forum is preparing against a guess. Work on the sections instead — they are the only thing in your control.
Letting the test become the whole household
Roughly one applicant in four receives a place. That means most well-prepared, capable children miss out, which is a fact about the arithmetic and not about them. Children read the temperature of a house very accurately; a calm one is worth more than an extra paper.

The odds, stated honestly

In 2025, 17,559 students applied for roughly 4,227 Year 7 selective places across the state — a little over four applicants per place, or about one applicant in four receiving an offer. The ratio has sat between 3.5 and 4.4 applicants per place every year since 2020. Those figures are not on a Departmental dashboard; they come out of the independent review of the disrupted 2025 test, and we have pulled the full year-by-year table into the NSW Selective Test guide.

Two things follow from that arithmetic, and they point in opposite directions. The first is that preparation is reasonable: turning up unfamiliar with the format, the timing and the screen makes an already difficult test harder for no good reason. The second is that most well-prepared, capable children will not get a place. That is what a four-to-one ratio means. It is a fact about the number of desks, not about your child.

We sell practice papers, so take this in that context: we make no claim that practice improves anyone's chance of an offer, and the Department itself disputes that coaching does. What practice reliably does is remove surprises — the interface, the pacing, the shape of the questions — so that whatever your child can do, they can do on the day. That is worth having, and it is not the same thing as an edge.

Where this sits in the 2027 timeline

The most recent test was sat on 1–2 May 2026, for Year 7 entry in 2027. The next one — for entry in 2028 — is expected in the first half of May 2027, with applications expected to open around early November 2026. Neither had been confirmed by the Department when we last checked in July 2026, so treat both as a pattern rather than a promise; our Selective Test dates guide tracks confirmed and expected dates separately and is updated when the Department publishes.

If you are reading this in the second half of 2026, you are early, which is the good end of the range to be at. A reasonable shape for the year: use the Department's free material through spring, start timed full papers in the new year, keep the intensity flat through Term 1, and taper in the last fortnight rather than sprinting. If you are reading this in April, do not panic-buy a stack of papers — do two full timed rehearsals per section, review them properly, and leave it there.

When the free papers run out

One pass, every paper, unlimited attempts

The ten questions are free, and so is a full paper in each subject — those are real papers, not teasers, but they are one per section and the free window is a day. Past that, everything in the catalogue is covered by a single pass rather than sold piece by piece: unlimited papers, unlimited attempts on the online player, and a worked explanation for every question in the review screen.

$12 — a day, if you just want a proper weekend of practice.
$29 — a week, for a school-holiday block.
$129 — everything through to the 2027 test.

Thirty-day money-back, no questions: reply to your receipt. And if the Department's free material still has life left in it, use that first — we would rather you came back when you have actually run out.

See passes & pricing → or browse the paper catalogue

Frequently asked

Questions about Selective practice tests

Is there a free NSW Selective practice test with no signup?

Yes. The ten questions at the top of this page are real Mathematical Reasoning questions from one of our full-length papers, and they need no account, no card and no email — your child answers them and sees how they went, with a worked explanation for each. If you want a complete timed paper afterwards, one per subject is free for 24 hours. The NSW Department of Education also publishes free official online practice tests on the real test engine, plus three complete sample tests as PDFs with answer keys, and those are worth doing first.

What does the NSW Selective Test actually cover?

Four timed sections, each worth 25% of the placement score: Reading (17 questions, some with several parts, 45 minutes), Mathematical Reasoning (35 questions, 40 minutes), Thinking Skills (40 questions, 40 minutes), and Writing (one typed task, 30 minutes). Everything except Writing is multiple choice, and no calculator is allowed in any section.

Is the Selective Test done on a computer?

Yes. Every sitting since 2025 has been fully computer-based, taken at an assigned test centre on a device the Department provides, running the Janison test platform. Children do not bring their own laptop and there is no paper booklet. That is why practising on screen matters: the timer, the flag button and the question grid are all things your child has to manage on the day.

When is the next NSW Selective Test?

The most recent sitting was 1–2 May 2026, for Year 7 entry in 2027. The next test — for Year 7 entry in 2028 — is expected in the first half of May 2027, based on the pattern of recent cycles, but the Department had not published a date when we last checked in July 2026. Applications for that cycle are expected to open around early November 2026.

How many practice tests should my child do?

There is no correct number, and grinding through dozens is not the point. A sensible pattern is one full timed paper per section to make the format ordinary, then targeted work on the question types your child actually finds hard, spread over months rather than crammed into the last few weeks. One paper reviewed properly teaches more than three papers rushed.

What is the difference between a practice test, a mock and a sample test?

In practice, nothing meaningful — parents use the three words interchangeably to mean a rehearsal of the real thing. What matters is whether it is the current computer-based format, whether it is full-length and timed, and whether it explains the answers afterwards. A short untimed quiz labelled "mock" is worth less than a full timed paper labelled "sample".

Do we need coaching to prepare for the Selective Test?

The Department of Education states plainly that coaching is not necessary, and there is no independent evidence that it improves a child's chance of a place. Familiarity with the four sections, the timing and the on-screen format is the part every family can cover themselves, free, using the Department's own material. We sell practice papers and we still say that.

What score does my child need to get into a selective school?

Nobody outside the Department can tell you, because the Department does not publish per-school minimum entry scores. The last official per-school figures were for 2021 entry, on a scoring scale that no longer exists. Any current "cut-off list" you see quoted is an estimate, usually assembled from parent forums. Families receive performance bands and an outcome, not a mark.

How hard are the ten questions compared with the real test?

They are ordinary questions from a real paper, not a showcase of the hardest ones, so the difficulty mix matches the paper they came from. What ten questions cannot show you is pacing, and pacing is most of what makes the real section hard: 35 questions in 40 minutes is a little over a minute each, with no calculator. For that, your child needs a full paper under time.

Can my child practise the Writing task here?

Not yet. We publish practice papers for the three multiple-choice sections — Mathematical Reasoning, Thinking Skills and Reading — and no Writing papers, because a writing task without marking is just a prompt. Our Selective Test writing guide sets out the Department's own sample prompts, what the section assesses, and practice topics you can use at home for free.

Keep going

For the whole process end to end — who can apply, how placement works, the odds by year — start with the NSW Selective Test guide. For how the placement score is built, the scoring guide. For confirmed and expected dates, Selective Test dates. For a month-by-month plan, how to prepare for the Selective Test. To go straight to the papers, the full catalogue — or the Mathematical Reasoning, Thinking Skills and Reading sections.