ICAS Year 9 test
Discover your students’ strengths and weaknesses
ICAS is a gold-standard Year 9 competition that can help you understand your students’ strengths and learning needs across core curriculum subjects.
It’s primarily run to recognise and reward academic achievements; however, the extensive results data helps to paint a vivid picture of each student’s learning progress, allowing you to hone your classes and meet their unique needs.
The Year 9 assessments are designed by psychometricians, education measurement experts and experienced teachers who use the curriculum as a guide.
How the ICAS Year 9 test can help you to understand your students’ performance
Discover their strengths and weaknesses, clearly marked on their results.
See whether their skill level is on par for their grade.
Discover which way their performance is trending based on last year’s results.
Be better placed to know whether you need to recommend extra classes for the gifted and talented.
See clear student comparisons against their classmates, the school, and the nation.
Discover which students may need a little extra support (or extra work!)
ICAS Year 9 test subjects
If you’d like to find out the correct Year 9 exam paper, check out our exam paper by year level page.
English
The Year 9 test for English may require students to undertake tasks such as interpreting meanings from titles, explaining irony (which can be a tough one), explaining words in context, and more. It aims to test their text comprehension, they use of vocabulary, their understanding of syntax, and how well they can write.
Mathematics
The Year 9 competition for ICAS Mathematics covers five broad areas that include number & arithmetic, space & geometry, and other key skills. Students may be asked to use angle properties of shapes, find probabilities of events, interpret Venn diagrams, and other challenging questions to test their abilities.
Science
The Year 9 assessment for Science tests skills such as determining paths of projectiles, drawing conclusions about forces, examining growth in living systems, and more. These covers five skill areas:
- Observing/measuring
- Interpreting
- Investigating
- Predicting/concluding
- Reasoning/problem solving
Writing
ICAS Writing for Year 9 is broken down into two types: persuasive writing, and narrative writing. As part of these, students may be asked to write reviews, council letters, or formal arguments, as well as narrative-style skills like describing characters or settings.
They’re marked on their use of genre, syntax, punctuation, and textual grammar within their writing.
Prepare for Year 9 ICAS with past papers
To help prepare your students for Year 9 ICAS, you can test them with real former questions and answers from previous competitions, all contained with our past papers.
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