ICAS Year 3 test
Get rich insights into your students’ learning
ICAS is an internationally-recognised, annual academic competition that yields rich insights into your students’ strengths and weaknesses.
Its main purpose is to recognise academic achievements, but the results data provided allows you to get a clearer understanding of how your students are performing for the core subjects, allowing you to adapt your lessons to suit their needs.
Every test is written by psychometricians, education measurement experts and experienced teachers, who use the curriculum as a guide when creating them.
How the Year 3 test for ICAS can help you to understand your
students’ needs
Compare their performance against their classmates and the rest of the school, to determine whether they’re on track.
Identify whether any students need a little extra help in class.
See students’ strengths and weaknesses, clearly marked for every key skill area.
Determine which students are performing below their grade, on par with their grade, or below their grade.
See which way your students’ academic performance is trending, and make the necessary adjustments.
Determine whether you need to set up new gifted and talented classes, or support classes.
ICAS Year 3 test subjects
English
For the ICAS Year 3 English test, students are required to identify, understand, and explain information within texts, which tests the following key skills:
- Syntax
- Vocabulary
- Writer’s craft
- Text comprehension
Their tasks may include identifying events in sequence, stating the main purpose of a text, joining sentences together with conjunctions and more.
Mathematics
The Year 3 ICAS Mathematics test is designed to test students’ higher-order thinking skills, and covers areas such as:
- Numbers
- Arithmetic
- Patterns
- Pre-algebra
- Units
- Measurement
- Space
- Shape
- Geometry
Science
The Year 3 Science test covers five different skill areas:
- Observing/measuring
- Investigating
- Interpreting
- Predicting/concluding
- Reasoning/problem solving
Students are expected to display competency for each of these, for topics such as life & living, energy & change and processed materials.
Digital Technologies
Digital Technologies for Year 3 aims to test skills such as formatting, multimedia, web concepts, operations, spreadsheets, and more. Students may need to create and edit documents, create simple slideshows, send and receive emails, interpret data in spreadsheets, and more.
Writing
The Year 3 ICAS Writing test aims to test a student’s grammar, syntax/punctuation, spelling, and whether they can write accurately for a specific genre.
The test is broken down into two areas: persuasive writing, in which the student must write in an influential way, and narrative writing which must include the key elements of a narrative, like characters and settings.
Spelling Bee
Year 3 Spelling Bee tests for words in three different contexts: dictation, applying rules and conventions and error correction.
The words range from common to uncommon, typically spelt to unusually spelt. This aims to test their visual memory, sound-letter relationships, using parts of words to build “word families,” and using word origins to get the right answer.
Help your students prepare for ICAS with past papers
If you’re looking for a way to help your students succeed at their ICAS tests, past papers are one of the most effective ways to do so.
All year levels for ICAS
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Year 7
Year 8
Year 9
Year 10
Year 11
Year 12