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ICAS Year 12 test

ICAS is really helpful in deciding my future goals as it helped to confirm my areas of interest and strength. It’s shown that I’m good at working under pressure, and I can come up with different answers by applying my knowledge.

Track your students’ abilities and improve your teaching

ICAS is an historic academic competition that challenges and motivates Year 12 students. But for teachers, it provides a goldmine of insights that validate your students’ strengths and weaknesses, and what you might do to address them.

The ICAS tests are created by a team of experienced psychometricians, teachers, and education measurement experts. They use the nation’s curriculum as a guide when creating the questions for Australia, New Zealand and other countries that participate in the competition.

What the ICAS Year 12 test will tell you about your students

How your students’ performance compares against their peers

How your students’ skill level compares to their expected year level grade

Your students’ strengths and weaknesses for each subject and sub-skill

Which students may need a little extra support, or extra work

Whether you may need to create new gifted and talented classes or support classes

How your students’ performance is trending from year to year

ICAS Year 12 test subjects

The ICAS exam papers change for depending on your country and students’ year levels. To locate the correct papers, check out our “Exam papers by year level” table here.

English

The Year 12 test for ICAS English is broken down into four categories: text comprehension, writer’s craft, syntax and vocabulary.

Students are expected to identify content like points of conflict, understand or explain things such as changes of perspective, analyse the impact of certain word choices and more.

Mathematics

Year 12 Mathematics competitors for ICAS are tested on the core skills for the subject, including number & arithmetic, algebra & patterns, space & geometry, and chance & data.

They may be asked to apply index laws to simplify expressions, solve problems with small time scales, use two-step probability, and solve a variety of other challenging mathematical problems suitable for their year level.

Science

Year 12 Science for ICAS tests students’ abilities to observe and measure, interpret scientific data, predict and conclude, investigate issues, and reason/problem solve.

They may be faced with challenges that requires them to measure microscopic objects, classify animals by sub-species, calculate refraction angles and more.

Writing

The Year 12 test for ICAS Writing assesses students on one of two forms of common writing: persuasive writing, where they may be required to write something like an opinion piece or campaign manifesto, and narrative writing, where they’ll find themselves writing character descriptions, narrative complications, setting descriptions or something else.

Their writing is marked based on their command of genre, textual grammar and syntax/punctuation.