The Thinking Skills Test Explained: 40 Questions

Of the four components of the NSW Selective High School Placement Test, the Thinking Skills test is the one parents ask about most and find the least information on. Maths looks like maths. Reading looks like English. Writing looks like something your child has been doing since Year 1. Thinking Skills maps to nothing on a school timetable, and that is precisely why it unsettles people.

So let's be plain about what is known, what isn't, and what actually follows for how you prepare.

What the Thinking Skills test looks like on the day

• 40 multiple-choice questions.
• 40 minutes to work through them, which averages out at about a minute each.
• Sat on a computer provided by the department, like every other component.
• No topic list, no syllabus, and nothing that can be looked up in a textbook the night before.

That last line is the important one. The department publishes the shape of the paper, the number of questions and the time allowed. It does not publish a body of content to learn, because there isn't one. Nothing on this paper is knowledge your child is expected to have acquired in advance.

Why the Thinking Skills test maps to no school subject

School is organised around content. A unit is taught, the class practises it, and the assessment asks about the thing that was taught. The child who studied is rewarded, which is fair and is how it should be.

This paper takes that scaffolding away entirely. Everything your child needs in order to answer a question is printed on the screen in front of them. There is no privileged information, no prerequisite unit, nothing a keener classmate covered last term. What is being measured is what they do with material they are meeting for the first time, under a clock.

For anxious parents this cuts both ways. You cannot get ahead on it, which is uncomfortable. Nobody else can get ahead on it either, which is the most reassuring sentence in this article.

What it is actually testing

A word of caution before the list. What the department publishes is the format of the paper, the question count and the timing, not an official taxonomy of question types. So treat any set of categories you find online, this one included, as a plain-English description of the kind of thinking involved rather than a syllabus to tick off.

Broadly, reasoning questions of this kind ask a child to do things like:

• Work out what must be true. Given a few statements, which conclusion follows necessarily, and which one merely sounds likely.
• Deduce under constraints. A handful of clues, several possible arrangements, and only one that fits every clue at once.
• Find the weak point in an argument. Somebody makes a case, and the job is to see where the reasoning breaks or what it quietly assumes without saying so.
• Read information precisely. A short passage, a table or a diagram, where the answer turns on one word that a fast reader glides over.
• See structure. Patterns, sequences and relationships where the rule has to be worked out rather than recalled.

The thread running through all of it is that the questions are self-contained. Being widely read does not help because of the facts it supplies. It helps, if at all, because of the habit of attention it builds.

Why you cannot cram it

Cramming works when there is a finite pile of facts and the exam draws from the pile. Two hours the night before genuinely moves the needle on a spelling list or a science unit, because the thing being tested is the pile.

There is no pile here. That is why the instinctive response, buying a thicker workbook in March, does so little on this component in particular. Reasoning grows the way fitness grows, in small increments across months, and it does not respond to a sprint at the end.

It is worth being honest that this also makes progress hard to see. A child does not go from "can't do logic puzzles" to "can do logic puzzles" on a Tuesday. They get slightly faster at spotting the shape of a problem, slightly less likely to accept a plausible-sounding conclusion, slightly better at holding four clues in their head at once. Those gains are real and they are cumulative, but they will not show up as a satisfying jump on a chart.

What practice actually helps

Given all that, the useful work is narrower than most families assume, and pleasantly cheap.

• Volume and variety of unfamiliar problems, rather than repetition of one type. The moment a puzzle type becomes recognisable, it has stopped teaching reasoning and started teaching recall.
• Talking the thinking out loud. "How do you know that has to be true?" is the single most valuable question you can ask, and it is worth asking after correct answers too.
• Drilling the difference between "must be true" and "could be true". An enormous share of lost marks live in that gap, and most children have never had it named for them.
• Working with the clock running, at least some of the time, so that a minute a question stops feeling like an alarm going off.
• Slowing down on the question itself. Most wrong answers are not failures of reasoning. They are correct reasoning applied to a slightly different question from the one on the screen.

Notice that none of these require you to know the material yourself. You do not have to be able to solve the puzzle to ask a child how they know their answer holds, and the asking is most of the value.

The reason it is on the test at all

It is easy to read Thinking Skills as an arbitrary hurdle, a paper invented to sort children when the other three could not. It is more useful to read it as the component least distorted by preparation. Every other paper can be bought, to some degree, with hours and tutoring. This one is largely a picture of how your child thinks when the ground has been taken away.

Which is also why it deserves the calmest posture of the four. Do a little, regularly, with conversation attached, and stop worrying about it in between. The thing it measures is the thing that keeps paying long after the test is a memory, in Year 9 science, in an argument they need to see through, in every problem that arrives without a worked example attached.