When to start, what to do each week, how to drill each section, and how to turn practice tests into actual score improvement. A complete EduTest preparation plan for 2026 and 2027 entry — not a list of tips.
Free · 3 days' access · Timed, exam-style papers with worked solutions
Good EduTest preparation runs nine to twelve months at four to five hours a week, built around one thing: a full timed mock early enough to tell you where the gaps actually are. Everything after that is targeted — drilling the two weakest sections, reviewing every mistake into one of four buckets, and adding a full mock every fortnight from roughly four months out.
Volume is not the lever. A child who sits fifteen papers and reviews every one will beat a child who sits thirty and reviews none. Vocabulary and writing need the longest runway, because they improve on the slowest curves.
If you have less time than that, the plan does not change — it compresses. Diagnose first, drill the bottom two sections, never practise untimed. There is a 2026 and 2027 timeline and a week-by-week timetable below.
There is no single right answer, but there is a clear relationship between runway and what you can realistically move. Find your situation below.
Everything is available to you, including the two slow-burn wins: vocabulary and writing. Start light — three short sessions a week — and build. Sit a diagnostic mock in month one so the whole plan has a baseline.
Realistic gain: large, across all five sections.
The window most families use, and enough for a genuine shift. Diagnose in week one, spend months two to six on skills, months five to eight on pace, and the final three months on full mocks.
Realistic gain: substantial, especially in reasoning.
Still workable, but you must prioritise ruthlessly. Diagnose immediately, pick the two weakest sections and give them 70% of the time. Add a full mock every fortnight from the start.
Realistic gain: good in maths and reasoning, modest in writing.
Skip familiarisation entirely. Sit a full timed paper this week, work only on the weakest two sections, add one mock a week, and taper completely in the final five days.
Realistic gain: pacing and exam technique — still worth real marks.
The honest answer on timing: the biggest single predictor of a good result is not how many months you had, it is whether the first month included an honest, timed, full-length diagnostic. Families who skip that step spend months polishing sections that were already fine.
EduTest sittings for scholarship and selective entry usually fall between February and May of the year before entry, with applications closing weeks earlier. Pick your entry year to see the month-by-month plan.
For 2026 entry, most families sat or will sit between February and May 2026, with applications closing in late 2025 or early 2026. If your child's sitting is still ahead, you are in the compression phase — everything below shifts to the right-hand column.
Shortlist schools and confirm which use EduTest. Sit one full timed diagnostic mock. Start a vocabulary habit and a weekly written piece. Three short sessions a week is plenty at this stage.
Section drills on the bottom two areas from the diagnostic. Vocabulary daily. One marked writing piece weekly. One full mock a month to track movement.
Submit applications — deadlines for 2026 entry cluster here. Switch every drill onto a timer. Mocks move to fortnightly.
Weekly full-length mocks under real conditions, each followed by a review longer than the paper itself. Writing continues weekly.
Final fortnight: error log only, no new material. Confirm the exact date, venue and ID requirements with the school. Keep the whole day free.
For 2027 entry, the sitting window falls roughly February to May 2027, with applications closing in late 2026. Starting now gives you the full runway — including the two things that need it most, vocabulary and writing.
Confirm which of your shortlisted schools use EduTest and for which entry year. Sit a full timed diagnostic. Begin daily vocabulary and one written piece a week.
Targeted drills on the two lowest sections. Verbal and numerical reasoning need exposure volume; maths needs arithmetic fluency. One full mock a month.
Applications for 2027 entry close around here — diarise each school separately, they differ. Every drill now runs on a timer. Mocks go fortnightly.
Weekly full mocks, deep review after each, error log maintained. Writing pieces marked against the four criteria every week.
Final two weeks are review-only. No new formats, no new providers, no late nights. Arrive rested rather than crammed.
Always confirm dates with the school. EduTest sitting dates, application deadlines and entry years vary by school and by state, and they change from year to year. Treat the windows above as planning guides and verify each school's own timetable before you build your calendar around it.
Preparation fails more often from wrong sequencing than from insufficient material. Run these six stages in order, whatever your runway.
Your child meets every question type once, untimed and unscored. The aim is only to remove the shock of the unfamiliar — particularly analogies, classifications and number series, which are not taught at school.
One full-length mock, properly timed, all five sections in one sitting. It will be uncomfortable and the score will be lower than you expect. That is the point — it is the only honest map of where the marks are missing.
Drill the two weakest sections. Short, frequent sessions beat long weekend blocks. Accuracy before speed at this stage — understanding why an answer works matters more than how fast it came.
Every drill now runs on a timer. This is where most of the visible score improvement appears, because most students already know more than they can demonstrate in 30 seconds a question.
Full mocks weekly or fortnightly, under real conditions. Builds stamina, section-switching, and the habit of never leaving a question blank.
Error log only. No new material, no new question formats, no new providers. The goal of the last fortnight is to arrive fresh, not to squeeze in one more topic.
A free timed mock gives you the baseline every other decision on this page depends on.
Four to five hours a week, spread across short sessions, beats one long Sunday block every time. Pick the phase you are in.
About 4 hours a week. Accuracy over speed. The two non-negotiables are daily vocabulary and one written piece — both improve slowly, so they start first.
About 5 hours a week. Everything now runs on a timer, and a full mock lands every fortnight. Review time starts to exceed practice time.
About 5 hours a week, tapering. One full mock weekly, reviewed properly, plus targeted work only on what the mock exposed. No new material after week six.
Why short sessions win: reasoning improves through frequency of exposure, not through duration. Five 40-minute sessions produce noticeably more movement than one three-hour block, and they are far easier to sustain across nine months without burnout.
The paper contains two ability tests and three achievement tests, and they respond to completely different work. See the full breakdown in our EduTest test format guide.
Practice tests are the engine of EduTest preparation, but only when used in the right order and reviewed properly. Most families use them backwards.
When a question type is genuinely new, accuracy comes before speed. Let your child work it out slowly and understand the underlying logic. This phase should last weeks, not months.
Once the type is understood, the clock goes on and stays on. Untimed practice past the early stage trains a skill the exam never tests, and it inflates confidence.
Through the middle months, single 30-minute sections are more useful than full papers. They isolate one skill and leave time for a proper review afterwards.
Practice material should match the entry year, not the current school year. A Year 6 student sitting Year 7 entry needs Year 7 entry papers.
An answer key alone teaches nothing on the questions your child got wrong — and those are the only ones that matter. Worked reasoning is non-negotiable.
Score every practice test section by section, not as one number. A single overall score hides exactly the information you need to plan the next month.
A word on "past papers". EduTest has never released a real past paper — questions are held in a secure bank and reused across schools and years. Anything advertised as a genuine past paper is mislabelled practice material. We explain what genuinely exists in our guide to EduTest past papers.
This is the single highest-leverage habit in EduTest preparation. Every wrong answer belongs in one of four buckets, and each bucket has a different fix. Lumping them together is why scores plateau.
The content or the concept was genuinely missing. Nothing about pace or care would have saved this mark.
They knew the material but answered a different question — missed a "not", a unit, or the word "except".
Solvable with 30 more seconds. The problem is pace, not knowledge — and it is the most common bucket of all.
Knew it, had time, still got it wrong. A transcription error, a sign flip, the wrong bubble.
One line per mistake, kept in a notebook or a spreadsheet. In the final fortnight this becomes the only revision material your child needs — and it is far more useful than another fresh paper.
| Date | Section | Question type | Bucket | What to do differently |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 Mar | Verbal | Analogy | Didn't know it | Didn't know "arduous". Added to vocab list. |
| 12 Mar | Maths | Word problem | Misread it | Answer wanted cm, I gave m. Underline units. |
| 14 Mar | Numerical | Number series | Ran out of time | Spent 90 sec on Q41. Move on at 40 sec. |
| 14 Mar | Reading | Inference | Careless slip | Picked B, meant C. Check before clicking. |
The review rule: if the review took less time than the paper did, the review wasn't done. Aim for roughly twice the paper's length in review, especially early on. This is the difference between fifteen papers that work and thirty that don't.
Roughly 30 to 36 seconds per question is the real constraint of the EduTest. Most students lose more marks to pace than to difficulty.
A mock is not just a longer practice test. It is the only format that trains stamina, section-switching, and recovering after a section that went badly.
12 to 15 full mocks across a nine to twelve month preparation, each fully reviewed. Fifteen with thorough review reliably outperforms thirty without it.
One a month through the building phase, fortnightly from about four months out, weekly in the final eight weeks. Then stop completely for the last five days.
Budget roughly twice the paper's length for review. A 2.5-hour mock deserves a review spread across the following two or three sessions.
Full format, live timer, worked solutions and section-by-section reporting — free for three days.
It is the only hand-marked section, it improves on the slowest curve of the five, and it is excluded from the official practice sets entirely — which means most families under-prepare it.
Is the thinking original, developed and clearly relevant to the prompt? One idea explored properly beats three covered thinly.
Does the piece have a clear shape, with paragraphs that build rather than restart? A planned structure is visible to a marker within thirty seconds.
Precise, varied, controlled word choice. Sentence length varied deliberately — markers notice rhythm even when they don't name it.
Spelling, punctuation, grammar. The easiest criterion to lift, and the one two minutes of proofreading usually recovers.
Rotate narrative, persuasive and descriptive. Never let your child choose their own topic — the exam won't.
On paper, on the clock. One idea, a shape, and an ending decided before the first sentence is written.
Match the real allocation for your child's sitting, leaving two minutes at the end to proofread.
Score each criterion separately rather than giving a general impression. A tutor, teacher or marking service is far more useful here than a parent's encouragement.
Not the whole piece. Take the weakest paragraph and rewrite it properly. This is where the improvement actually happens.
The trap to avoid: a memorised story bolted onto whatever prompt appears. Markers see hundreds of these and score them down on relevance. Practise adapting one strong idea to an unseen prompt rather than pre-writing a piece.
Almost every family we work with has made at least two of these. They are all easy to fix once named.
The parent's actual job: protect the schedule, keep sessions short and regular, and make sure the review happens. You do not need to know the content. The families whose children improve most are the ones who kept four modest sessions a week running for nine months, not the ones who ran intensive holiday bootcamps.
The questions families ask us most often when planning their preparation.
Nine to twelve months before the sitting is ideal, because vocabulary and writing improve on slow curves and need the runway. Six months is workable with a diagnostic mock first and tight focus on the two weakest sections. Under eight weeks, skip familiarisation entirely and go straight to timed practice and weekly mocks.
Four to five hours a week, split into four or five short sessions, is enough and is sustainable across nine months. Frequency matters more than duration for reasoning sections. One three-hour weekend block produces noticeably less movement than five 40-minute sessions.
Between 12 and 15 full-length mocks across a full preparation, each fully reviewed, alongside regular single-section drills. Volume without review is the most common mistake we see — fifteen well-reviewed papers reliably beat thirty rushed ones.
Daily vocabulary, 15 to 20 minutes, from the first month. Verbal Reasoning rewards vocabulary breadth more than any other section, and it is the one habit that compounds reliably over months. Second place goes to sitting an honest timed diagnostic early.
Untimed only when a question type is genuinely new — a few weeks at most. After that, everything runs on a timer. The EduTest gives roughly 30 to 36 seconds per question, and untimed practice trains a skill the exam never tests while inflating confidence.
Sort every wrong answer into four buckets: didn't know the content, misread the question, ran out of time, or careless slip. Each has a different fix. Re-attempt before reading the solution, log one line per mistake, and aim for a review roughly twice as long as the paper took.
One timed piece a week, on an unseen prompt, marked by a person against the four criteria: ideas and content, organisation, language and vocabulary, and conventions. Then rewrite the weakest paragraph rather than the whole piece. It is excluded from the official practice sets, so it needs its own routine.
No. Marks are awarded for correct answers and nothing is deducted for wrong ones, so an unanswered question can only score zero while a guess has a real chance. Teach your child to answer every question and to guess quickly rather than linger.
They are a reasonable starting point but incomplete. The publisher's sets are untimed, run 20 questions per block rather than 50 to 60, and exclude Written Expression entirely. They cannot teach pacing, which is the main difficulty of the paper. Most families use them for familiarity and something timed and full-length for actual preparation.
No — EduTest has never released one. Questions are held in a secure bank and reused across schools and years. Anything advertised as a genuine past paper is mislabelled practice material. See our guide to EduTest past papers for what genuinely exists.
Sittings for scholarship and selective entry generally fall between February and May of the year before entry, with applications closing weeks to months earlier. Dates vary by school and by state and change year to year, so confirm each of your shortlisted schools individually rather than relying on a general window.
Stop introducing anything new. Skim the error log, keep one short session a day at most, and sleep properly. Confirm the venue, start time and ID requirements with the school. Nothing learned in the last five days survives exam pressure, but arriving rested measurably helps.
Every decision on this page depends on one number: an honest, timed, section-by-section baseline. It takes an afternoon, it is free, and it will change what you do for the next nine months.
