The ACER test is conducted across Australia to determine academically gifted students for awarding scholarships. This test is highly competitive and requires solid preparation to ace the test. Students appearing for this exam need to demonstrate certain skills such as the ability to understand, infer, deduct, and critically think. Remember: the exam is not based on curriculum and its motto is not to see how well you can retrieve learned knowledge. This is exactly why you must make special preparations to crack the exam.

The exam has three sections: written expressions, humanities (comprehension and interpretation), and mathematical reasoning. In this article, we’ll share tips on acing each section like a pro!

Written expressions:

There are two sections of written expressions, and both require you to understand different writing structures and answer them accordingly. Two sections of writing expressions have been kept for the assessors to check how well students can comprehend and write two different writing styles. To crack this section, it’s not just enough to possess a strong vocabulary or good grammatical skills. Almost 10,000 students appear for this exam, and your piece must be unique to stand out! Scholarship exams such as the ACER exam require you to have higher skills. To ace this section, here’s what you need to do:

  • Be original. Choose your storyline carefully and use attractive terminologies to work on your piece. Plan it well to fit within the 25 minutes’ time frame.
  • The piece should be relevant to the prompt. The prompt could be in the form of an image, statement, or combination of both.
  • Work on your fluency and syntax control. Write clear sentences so that it can be easily understood.
  • Be very selective with the choice of words to make your piece attractive.

Humanities:

Basically, it is a reading comprehension test. You will be given passages on various topics such as history, art, English, geography, etc. Note that you don’t need to read any humanities subject to score this section. As already mentioned, it’s all about your thinking and problem-solving skills that the assessors will check. All you need to do is read the comprehension thoroughly because sometimes, the answer is already there in the passage. By reading the material carefully, you can arrive at a conclusion. This section will present you with various texts such as poetry, cartoons, fiction, non-fiction, maps, etc.

Mathematical reasoning

This section of the ACER test attempts to measure your scientific and mathematical abilities. Questions are drawn from different sources and are not the same as the school curriculum. What you have learned at school are just the basics. This test will simply check your application techniques. Simply put, how well you can apply the basics to solve a maths problem. But the toughest part is determining which calculation to apply to each question. You must learn the art of synthesizing information and decide what, how, and when to use it!

For ACER maths and humanities, you can follow the tips discussed below:

  • Try ACER practice tests as much as possible to get insights into the question format and the question types. Disregard the time limit and concentrate more on getting the question right.
  • Check out the solved answer in case you didn’t get the answer correct.
  • Find the right strategies to solve the questions you didn’t get correct. This is to ensure that you easily do the right calculation when you face similar questions.
  • Repeat the above steps till you achieve 95 to 100%. The more you practice, the better you can see yourself improving.
  • Once you’ve mastered the above steps, then try out the practice tests within time limit. This will also help you practice time management which is extremely crucial to complete the whole question paper.

Just keep in mind the above tips and you can easily crack the exam.  Getting a scholarship is a lifetime opportunity and it will provide endless benefits. The only key to passing the exams is to practice online tests regularly. The more you know about the type of questions being asked, it becomes easier to solve each of the sections.