What is an ACER scholarship exam, how hard is the test and should you prepare?

If you have applied for your child to sit a scholarship or are planning to do so, you may be advised that it will be an ACER scholarship exam.

Scholarships provide parents with access to the top private schools at a fraction of what it normally costs, saving parents around $7,000 each year ($40,000 over 6 years).

A scholarship is a once in a lifetime opportunity that gives your child a significant advantage in life. So what is an ACER scholarship test and more importantly, how do you prepare your child for it?

There are 3 major test setters in Australia; they are ACER, Edutest and Academic Assessment Services (aka AAS and formerly known as Robert Allwell & Associates).

Most schools don’t write their own scholarship exams, as assessments are quite difficult to do. Instead, they outsource testing to companies. ACER is one of the 3 major companies that do this. ACER (also known as the Australian Council for Educational Research) is one of the oldest and respected of the 3 companies with around 10,000 students sitting ACER exams (Sydney Morning Herald, 2018).

An ACER scholarship test for Level 1 (this is if your child is doing the exam to enter Year 7 or Year 8) generally has 4 parts being 2 written expression tasks, mathematics and "humanities" - comprehension and interpretation (this is really a reading comprehension test). Each of these test parts will be explained in more detail below (time, format, what it tests exactly).

So how hard is an ACER scholarship exam?

Like most scholarship exams, ACER scholarship exams are very difficult because they test things that your child DOESN'T learn at school. Reasoning and problem solving feature heavily. As quoted by the General Manager of School Assessment, Barbara Smith:

The tests assess a student’s ability to interpret, infer, deduce and think critically,....they aren’t curriculum based so don’t test a student’s ability “to retrieve learned knowledge"

Additionally, there is the problem of the very short time limit – usually 60 seconds to complete a multiple-choice question and 25 minutes to write a full-length essay.

As a guide, your child should be performing 1-2 grades above their current grade in both Maths and English. This means an A to A+ in order to be considered baseline competitive as candidates who sit the exam are most likely to be at that level already.

ACER scholarship exams are even harder in selection compared to their exams for selective schools (ACER also produce the NSW selective school test, Brisbane State High and GATE in Western Australia). This is because a scholarship may provide 1-3 spots a year while selective schools often have 225 spots or more.

So should you prepare? The ACER website and all the test preparation people tell us not to!

Our short answer is "Yes". Not because we work in test preparation but because it makes sense to prepare. It is an exam afterall.

The savings for a scholarship can be more than $44,244 over 6 years from Grade 7 – 12, the stakes are high because of the financial reward and so is the competition. Many children commonly put in 168+ hours of preparation 6 months ahead of test date.

We believe the reason why exam companies discourage preparation is because they want their exam to select students fairly, however, in the real world, people do prepare and students who do prepare can get an advantage. I have personally seen instances where naturally gifted students missed out to someone who was prepared because they had poor exam technique (just because you are gifted doesn’t mean that you naturally have good exam technique).

Another reason we believe companies discourage preparation is because it isn't good practice to be seen encouraging students to be competitive and to engage in coaching that stresses students out.

However, if parents take this advice and their child doesn't prepare at all, they're at a significant disadvantage. They'll be stressed out during the exam as everything is unfamiliar to them and they'll be competing with students who did prepare.

The thing with preparation is that it can be done in a sensible way - preparing early and making it part of a regular habit is a way of preparation that doesn't cause unnecessary stress and can be effective.

It would be unfair to put your child into the ACER exam without preparation. It is a time-driven exam and totally different from what they get at school.

Get them help so they go into the test knowing what to do and how to do their best.

What’s in an ACER scholarship Level 1 exam – test format, number of questions and time limit?

An ACER scholarship Level 1 scholarship exam has 4 parts although schools can customise for their own needs.

Barbara Smith, general manager of school assessment has said that “Writing tasks are graded on uniqueness and quality of original ideas, with structure and flow more important than perfect spelling and grammars." (Sydney Morning Herald, 2018)

Additionally, ACER is well-known to have questions that seem very difficult in terms of problem solving, but the mathematics used to get to the answer is actually very simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

The 4 parts along with their description (including time limits and estimated number of questions per test *) are shown below:

﹡ The number of questions and time limit have been estimated from the ACER website and publicly available information. Please note that the authoritative body can change the number of questions and time limits from year to year so please refer to their websites for the most up to date information. Time per question is calculated by taking the time limit divided by number of questions.

﹡﹡ Calculated as the identified cost of private school tuition fees of $36,870 per year for inner suburb of capital city multiplied by 20%.

As you'll see, the scholarship test revolves heavily around thinking skills rather than curriculum – this means you’ll need test preparation that teaches logical reasoning. Logical reasoning is unfamiliar to many parents but it can be taught and is a study area under ‘logic’ a branch of study under philosophy. Our courses and test questions are developed by one of our exam experts who majored in philosophy and studied logic reasoning from a logic professor at the renowned University of Melbourne.

Your child needs support and expert programs designed around building skills in reasoning that they don’t teach you at school. These are the skills that will help your child answer those hard questions they get the high marks for. Most children can answer the easier questions but it’s the harder questions that help your child get selected for a scholarship.

How Do You Prepare Your Kid For the ACER Scholarship Test?

Because the questions reward children who can do problem solving, the questions are rarely straightforward. They require reasoning skills - something that is rarely taught in schools but something we teach at Exam Success.

So how can your child prepare?

The first step is to do sample question papers and to figure out what areas your child needs to work on.

ACER does produce a range of practice questions here that can be purchased on the ACER website.

However, these papers don't provide the detailed solutions and explanations your child needs to know to:

1. Answer the question.
2. Answer similar questions of the same type.

We have found that there are a limited number of ways you can test logical reasoning and have created our own set of questions with detailed solutions that explain, step-by-step how your child can get the answer correct.

These have been used by students to prepare for an ACER exam and successfully gain a scholarship.

You can sign up here for our teaching test bank - smart practice with sample similar to ACER questions + how-to-answer videos.

When I do private tuition, the process I use to help students gain a scholarship involves just 5 steps!

For ACER humanities and mathematics:

1. Do a practice test disregarding the time limit. Focus on getting the question right and find out what your score is in the end.
2. For any question you didn’t get correct, figure out what should be the correct answer (and check it with your answer key).
3. For those same questions, come up with strategies so that when you’re faced with a similar question next time, you’ll be able to answer it. Hone your strategy over time so that you reduce the number of steps it takes to get to the answer (and so that you can answer the question more quickly).
4. Repeat steps 1 – 3 until you get a score of 95-100%. Each time you repeat it, if done properly, your child should be seeing a higher score in their practice test.
5. Then do practice tests within the time limit. What you’ll find is that working in a time limit is easier, once you have a process to answering various questions correctly.

While they look like 5 easy steps, going through each step does time a long time if done properly and coming up with strategies takes time. The strategy that has the least step is the quickest way there but it requires clear thought and understanding around logical links. You can develop these strategies yourself, or you can do our courses where these strategies are provided.

Written Expression is a bit trickier as there are so many ways where your writing can lose marks (we’ve identified 52!).

Based on our experience helping students get scholarships, we’ve found that students improve dramatically and quickly through targeted feedback. Writing improves quickly when you have experts providing feedback. Your child shouldn’t have to sit in class and learn grammar rules, but rather, they should:

1. Write their essay
2. Get customized feedback.
3. Repeat steps 1-2 again. Using the feedback, overtime, students see an improvement in their essays. They stop making the same mistakes and their writing is better.

A scholarship is much sought after – it provides parents and children with access to the most prestigious and top schools at a reduced price (savings usually $40,000 over 6 years). It is a lifetime opportunity that provides your child with endless benefits.

Here's test preparation designed for your child's success