Most descriptions of the selective entry exam stop at "about three hours, maths and English". That is true, and it tells your child almost nothing about what they will open on the day.
This page goes section by section. Every structural number comes from ACER's published sample material and from a firsthand account of the June 2026 paper, and the sample questions are ACER's own, so you can judge the difficulty for yourself without taking a tutoring company's word for it.
The Shape of the Day
The paper runs as three timed blocks. Once a block closes, your child cannot go back to it.
Block 1
60 minutes75 to 90 questionsMathematics, then Quantitative Reasoning
Not mixed. All the maths first, then the section changes.
Block 2
55 minutes75 questions in 2026Reading and Verbal Reasoning
Fully mixed, the whole way through. A passage, then verbal items, then another passage, and a student switches between two very different kinds of thinking every couple of minutes.
Writing
40 minutes2 pieces, about 20 minutes eachOne creative piece, one persuasive piece
The creative prompt in 2026 was a picture, not a sentence.
Every multiple choice question has exactly four options, A to D. There are no five-option items anywhere in ACER's official samples.
The mixing rule differs between the two blocks, and families regularly get this backwards. Block 1 keeps its sections apart: all the maths, then all the quantitative reasoning. Block 2 interleaves Reading and Verbal Reasoning the whole way through.
Block 1, Part One: Mathematics
Algebra and geometry carry the most weight, and around them sit probability, statistics, percentages, index laws, linear and simultaneous equations, inequalities, rearranging formulae and some trigonometry. A Year 8 student has met most of these topics. What they have usually never met is the way the questions are built.
Three things catch students out.
1. One stimulus feeds several questions
A diagram, a paragraph of prose and a bulleted list of conditions sit above the numbered questions. ACER's 2023 sample uses an archery target whose rings are labelled x, x-d, x-2d and x-3d, with dots marking where the arrows landed across two days, then a set of scoring rules for each day, and only then asks for the value of d. Reading the setup is most of the work.
2. The algebra is inside the picture
Labels on a diagram carry pronumerals where a student expects numbers. Anyone used to reading values straight off a figure has to translate first, and that costs seconds.
3. The answer is often an expression
School maths tends to end in a number. Here all four options can be symbolic, so a student loses the usual sanity check of seeing whether an answer came out neat.
ACER sample question · Mathematics
A circle has a radius of 4. A rectangle measures x+2 by x. The two shapes have equal perimeters. What is the value of x?
- π - 1
- 2π - 1
- 2π - 4
- 4π - 1
Answer: 2π - 1
No option is a decimal, so a student reaching for a calculator has already lost the question.
Block 1, Part Two: Quantitative Reasoning
This is the section most families have never seen, because nothing in the Victorian curriculum looks like it. It is not maths in the school sense at all.
Expect number series, rules linking pairs and triplets of numbers, deductive word problems built on fractions, ciphers, ordering puzzles, matrix logic, and a run of items that contain no words or numbers whatsoever.
ACER sample question · Number series
4, 7, 13, 25, ?
Answer: 49
Differences of 3, 6 and 12, doubling each time. Nothing here is taught.
ACER sample question · Deductive fractions
There are 32 roses, 23 of which are white. One quarter of Sam's roses are red. Two thirds of Kim's roses are white. How many of Sam's roses were white?
Answer: A single number, reached by setting the two conditions against the totals
Two people, two fractions and one shared total. The arithmetic is ordinary Year 6 work, and the whole difficulty lies in holding four constraints straight while the clock runs.
ACER sample question · Visual transformation
A flower of seven shaded circles is changed step by step by an arrow. Which arrangement comes next?
Answer: One of four pictures
No words and no numbers. This is pure non-verbal reasoning, and a student who has only ever practised written questions meets it for the first time in the exam hall.
If you buy or download only one kind of practice material, make it this one. Quantitative reasoning is the section where a strong school report predicts the least.
Block 2: Reading and Verbal, Mixed Together
Students sat 75 questions in 55 minutes in June 2026. That works out at about 44 seconds each, which makes this the tightest block of the day.
The two strands are genuinely interleaved. A student reads a passage, answers a few comprehension questions, meets five verbal reasoning items, then arrives at another passage.
This has a direct consequence for practice at home. Working through a page of comprehension and then a separate page of analogies rehearses both skills while quietly skipping the one the exam adds, which is switching between two very different kinds of thinking every couple of minutes. Practice sets should mix them in a single sitting.
Inside the Reading Questions
Passages are mostly short and lean heavily towards informative non-fiction. The June 2026 paper included articles on the Great Barrier Reef and workplace scenarios written from several characters' points of view, where the difficulty lies in working out the author's position. At the easier end sit advertisements. At the harder end sit philosophical texts, including several passages quoting Greek philosophers.
Inference dominates. Questions about vocabulary in context and figurative language appear steadily, and there is a smaller run on main idea, tone and purpose. Two formats surprise almost every student who has prepared using ordinary comprehension workbooks.
The single quotation item
One attributed line of text, then one question, then the paper moves on. ACER's sample takes a line from Dante's Divine Comedy and asks what the quotation emphasises, with four single-word options: understanding, thoroughness, decisiveness, memory. Around seven items took this shape in 2026.
The four-comment discussion
An italic lead-in introduces four one-sentence comments, each taking a different position on the same topic. The questions then work across all four: which word in comment 4 most strongly implies a moral judgement, or which comment assumes the objects under discussion belong to all of humanity. There is no passage to re-read. The entire task is analysis.
Both formats exist because they test the same analytic skill far faster than a long passage can. They fit the 40-second budget far better than a 600-word extract can.
Inside the Verbal Reasoning Questions
Classification, analogies and deductive items make up the bulk, with synonyms and antonyms, syllogisms, coding, jumbles and essential-part questions filling the rest. The vocabulary is harder than most Year 8 students expect, and the distinctions the exam asks them to draw are finer still.
ACER sample question · Analogy
PAIN is to INJURY as GRIEF is to...
- FURY
- LOSS
- TIME
- WORRY
Answer: LOSS
Pain is the reaction to an injury, so grief is the reaction to a loss. Three of the four options are emotionally plausible, which is the point.
ACER sample question · Odd one out
Which of the following words does not belong with the other three?
- DREAD
- REGRET
- FOREBODING
- APPREHENSION
Answer: REGRET
Dread, foreboding and apprehension all look forward. Regret looks back. Every option is a form of unease, so the category alone cannot separate them and the student has to find the direction in time.
ACER sample question · Syllogism
Assume that some children eat pears, that nobody who eats pears likes oranges, and that all people who like oranges also like broccoli. Which one of the following statements must be true?
Answer: Some children do not like oranges.
The broccoli clause exists to be discarded. Formal logic like this sits outside the Victorian curriculum altogether, and firsthand accounts of the 2026 paper describe a great deal of it.
The Writing Block
Forty minutes, two pieces: one creative and one persuasive, at roughly twenty minutes each. Plenty of preparation material still describes this as a single extended piece, which leaves a student budgeting their time for the wrong exam.
These were the real prompts in June 2026, useful as a difficulty benchmark:
Creative
A picture of a butterfly or moth.
An image, with no sentence to start from. Most home practice uses written prompts, so this is worth rehearsing deliberately.
Persuasive
How can we balance human needs with environmental conservation?
A broad issue question with no single defensible side, which rewards a clear position and punishes a student who spends ten of their twenty minutes deciding.
Twenty minutes covers planning, writing and any checking. A student who has only ever written to a homework deadline tends to discover this the hard way.
The Real Difficulty is the Clock
Roughly 165 multiple choice questions sit inside about 115 minutes of testing. That is close to 40 seconds per question across the paper as a whole, and Block 2 on its own runs nearer 44.
~40s
Per question, whole paper
~44s
Per question, Block 2
20 min
Per writing piece
This is where the gap opens between a strong school student and a strong exam student. A child who can solve every one of these questions given two minutes each will still run out of paper time, and the skill that closes that gap is knowing when to abandon a question and move on. It takes deliberate practice against a clock, and it is rarely taught at school because school assessment does not need it.
What This Means for Preparation
- Mix reading and verbal reasoning in one sitting, because the exam does.
- Use a clock from early on. Untimed practice builds knowledge and hides the real problem.
- Put deliberate time into non-verbal and spatial questions, which appear nowhere in school.
- Practise writing from an image, not only from a sentence prompt.
- Teach the decision to skip. Forty seconds is the budget, and a stubborn student loses five easy marks defending one hard one.
- Read short non-fiction: science journalism, opinion columns, advertisements, argument.
Timing matters as much as content, and if you are working out when to begin, our companion piece on when to start preparing for selective school works backwards from exam day, and sets out the study routine we teach alongside it.
Common Questions
Is there a penalty for a wrong answer?
ACER does not deduct marks for incorrect multiple choice answers, so leaving a question blank gains nothing. Answer every item, even where a guess is all that is left.
Can my child use a calculator?
No. The maths is built so that a calculator would not help much anyway, since so many answers come out as symbolic expressions.
Are the sections equally weighted?
ACER does not publish the weighting, and any provider quoting exact percentages is estimating. What is public is the structure and timing set out above.
Are there official past papers?
No. ACER publishes sample questions, which is where every example on this page comes from. Everything else on the market, ours included, is a reconstruction of the format.
How many questions should a student expect to finish?
Finishing every question is not the goal at this speed. Accuracy across the items a student does reach usually beats a rushed pass over all of them.
Does the writing count as much as the multiple choice?
Both contribute. The writing block is 40 of roughly 155 minutes of assessed time, so it carries real weight in the day.
Quick Summary
- Block 1: 60 minutes, Mathematics then Quantitative Reasoning, 75 to 90 questions, sections kept apart
- Block 2: 55 minutes, Reading and Verbal Reasoning fully mixed, 75 questions in 2026
- Writing: 40 minutes, one creative piece and one persuasive piece, about 20 minutes each
- Every multiple choice question has four options, A to D
- About 40 seconds per question across the paper, nearer 44 in Block 2
- Quantitative reasoning and non-verbal items are the biggest gap against school work
A student who has seen all three blocks before exam day spends their energy on the questions rather than on the format.
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