How the Selective School Test Is Scored

Parents often ask us what the selective test is "out of", and the honest answer is that it is not out of anything you can add up at home. The Selective High School Placement Test has four sections, Reading, Mathematical Reasoning, Thinking Skills and Writing, each worth exactly a quarter of the placement score. The department scales the four results and combines them into one number, there is no pass mark, and places at each school go in placement-score order. That is the whole system in three sentences. The rest of this page is what each of those sentences means for a child sitting it.

Four sections, a quarter each

Section	Questions	Marks	Time	Share of placement score
Reading	17, three with several parts	38 responses, one mark each	45 minutes	25%
Mathematical Reasoning	35	35, one mark each	40 minutes	25%
Thinking Skills	40	40, one mark each	40 minutes	25%
Writing	One task	Marked against criteria	30 minutes	25%

The equal weighting is the single most important fact about the scoring, and the one families most often plan as if it were not true. A child who is strong in maths and weak in writing does not get to lean on the maths. The 30-minute Writing task carries exactly the same weight as the 40 Thinking Skills questions.

One mark per response

In the three multiple-choice sections, every response is worth one mark. The word "response" is the department's, and it is doing some work in Reading, where three of the 17 questions have several parts and the section carries 38 responses in all. A multi-part question is worth several marks. Children who leave it to the last two minutes and guess are giving up more than they think.

There are no calculators in any section, and each section is timed on its own, so finishing Thinking Skills early does not buy extra time for Writing. A question left blank cannot score, which is why, when the clock is running out, a reasoned choice beats an empty one. It is worth confirming the department's current marking guidance before the day.

Writing: criteria, not an answer key

Writing is the one section without a right answer. Responses are marked against criteria such as ideas, structure, language and expression, and independently of anything the child's school has assessed. The marks are then scaled and combined with the other three sections so that Writing contributes its 25% on the same footing as the multiple-choice sections.

Because the task is 30 minutes long, the criteria reward a planned, finished response over an ambitious one that stops mid-sentence. The Writing guide covers the prompt styles and how to plan inside the time.

Why the raw marks are not simply added

A worked example shows the problem. Say a child gets 30 of the 38 Reading responses right, 28 of 35 in Mathematical Reasoning and 30 of 40 in Thinking Skills, and the marker records the Writing task at roughly two thirds of the available criteria. Adding 30, 28 and 30 would give Reading and Thinking Skills different influence simply because they have different numbers of marks, and Writing could not be added at all. Turn each into a proportion of its own total instead, about 79%, 80%, 75% and 67% here, and the four sit on the same footing before they are combined. The equal weighting then makes each one worth a quarter.

The department's scaling does more than this simple conversion, which is why the placement score on the outcome report is not a number you can reproduce from the raw marks. But the principle is the one in the example: every section counts the same, whatever its mark total.

From a score to an offer

The placement score does not pass or fail anybody. It puts every applicant in order, and places at each school are offered in that order against the schools each family chose. Each school on the list gets its own outcome: an offer, a place on the school's reserve list, or unsuccessful.

That is why there is no fixed cut-off. A school's entry score is the placement score of the last child offered a place that year, and it moves with the applicants, how many of them chose that school and how many places it had. Children close to a school's level may be offered a partially selective stream instead. We have covered outcomes, reserve lists and appeals in Selective school test results and entry scores explained.

One more thing families ask about: the placement test is the main factor in entry decisions. School assessment information may be considered in some circumstances, but strong test performance remains the thing that decides it.

Four things parents get wrong about the score

The score is not out of 100. It is a scaled placement score, not a percentage of questions right, and it only means something next to the outcomes it produced.

A strong maths result does not make up for Writing. Each section is capped at its quarter.

Last year's entry score is not this year's cut-off. It is the last offer made that year, and it moves.

Finishing every question is not the goal. Accuracy on the questions attempted counts as much, many children do not finish, and knowing when to move on is part of what the test measures.

What this means for the next six months

With four equal weights, the weakest section is where the next mark is cheapest. Lifting a weak section from a low mark to a middling one moves the placement score more than polishing a strength, and the weak section is very often Writing. Multi-part Reading questions deserve their time because they carry more marks than they look. And pacing has to be planned for 45, 40, 40 and 30 minutes separately, not for the day as a whole.

If you want to see how a set of practice marks would translate, the free Selective Test Calculator uses the same logic. It turns each section mark into a percentage, averages the four equally, and compares the result with an estimated band for every NSW selective high school, so you can see which schools are within reach now and what it would take to reach the one you want. The full format and the 2027 dates are in the NSW Selective School Test guide.