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ICAS Year 9 test

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Discover your students’ strengths and weaknesses

ICAS is a gold-standard online competition that can help you understand your Year 9 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 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 paper for various year levels, check out our exam paper by year level page.

English

The Year 9 English test 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

Year 9 Mathematics for ICAS 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

Year 9 Science for ICAS test 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

ICAS can help to unlock your students’ potential.
The ICAS competition helps you to determine your students’ skill levels for related areas of the curriculum, helping to create lesson plans, write reports, and have good information for parent/teacher interviews.