How Much Practice Is Enough?
Every parent preparing a child for the Selective test eventually asks the same question, usually at about 9pm on a Sunday: are we doing enough? It is a hard question to answer honestly, because the number of hours is not what decides the outcome, and saying so sounds like an excuse.
So here is the useful version of the answer. There is a shape of week that works, it is smaller than most families imagine, and there are specific signs that you have gone past the point where more practice helps.
The shape that works
Three sessions a week, of twenty to forty minutes, with one of them timed. That is it. A child doing that from the start of Year 5 has done more useful work by May than a child doing two hours every Saturday, and has done it without the Saturday becoming something to dread.
- One session on the weakest strand, untimed, where the point is understanding rather than speed.
- One session of mixed questions, timed, so pace stays honest.
- One session of something that is not multiple choice: a piece of writing, or reading a chapter and talking about it.
The third one is the session families skip, and it is the one that compounds. Writing is thirty minutes of the test and the only part that is not multiple choice, and it improves through reading more reliably than through practice papers. The writing test explained sets out what is actually being marked.
Little and often beats long and rare
Twenty minutes of fractions on four days does more than eighty minutes of assorted maths on one. This is not motivational advice; it is how practice at this age actually converts into recall under time pressure.
Why more is not better after a point
The Selective test is not a memory test. Thinking Skills maps to no school subject and cannot be crammed, and the maths paper is deliberately built so that reasoning matters more than recall: we go into that in reasoning, not memorising.
That has a practical consequence. Past a certain volume, extra questions stop teaching anything, because the child is no longer meeting new kinds of problem. They are meeting the same problem again, faster, and getting more confident at a method that may be wrong. This is how a child arrives in May able to answer quickly and unable to notice when a question is not the one they think it is, which is exactly the trap set out in the traps hidden in multiple choice.
Three signs you have gone too far
- Scores stop moving while the hours keep rising. This is the clearest one, and it means the practice has become repetition rather than learning.
- Your child can do the question but cannot say why the answer is right. Speed has outrun understanding, and under pressure the understanding is what holds.
- Practice has become a negotiation. If every session starts with an argument, the sessions are now costing more than they return, and a week off will not undo the year.
None of these means stopping. All of them mean changing what the practice is: fewer questions, more review, more talking about why, and a timed section only once a week.
What to do with the time you get back
The two highest-value uses of an hour, once the basics are steady, are reviewing wrong answers and reading. Reviewing a paper properly takes about as long as sitting it, and almost nobody does it; the marks are all in there, already paid for.
Reading is slower and quieter and matters more than any of it. Seventeen dense questions in forty-five minutes rewards a child who reads comfortably, and no amount of comprehension practice substitutes for it. The Selective reading test explains what that paper is really asking for.
And if you are building the year rather than the week, preparing in Year 5 lays the same idea out term by term.
Selective Edge is not affiliated with the NSW Department of Education or the Selective High Schools Test administrators. This guide is general information for parents, drawn from publicly available test materials.