What is an Academic Assessment Services (AAS) scholarship exam and how hard is the test?

If you have applied for your child to sit a scholarship or are planning to do you, you may be advised that it will be an Academic Assessment Services scholarship exam. What is this and how do you prepare your child for it?

Academic Assessment Services are an exam provider/setter. There are 3 major test setters in Australia; they are ACER, Edutest and Academic Assessment Services (aka AAS and formerly known as Robert Allwell & Associates).

A scholarship provides you with affordability (parents receive a fee reduction usually 20-100% on tuition fees, usually saving parents more than $7000 a year) so that your child can access to the most prestigious schools.

It is a once in a lifetime opportunity that gives your child a significant advantage in life. However, in order to gain a scholarship, your child must sit a competitive test.

Schools don’t write their own scholarship exams, as assessments are quite difficult to do. Instead, they outsource testing to companies.

An Academic Assessment Services scholarship test has 4 parts being abstract reasoning and problem solving, mathematics achievement and reasoning, reading comprehension and written expression. Each of these test parts will be explained in more detail below (time, format, what it tests exactly).

So how hard is an Academic Assessment Services scholarship exam?

Like most scholarship exams, Academic Assessment Services scholarship exams are very difficult due to:

• Very short time limit – usually 60 seconds to complete a multiple-choice question and 25 minutes to write an essay.
• Testing both achievement (what you learn at school) and problem solving (something students don’t get taught at school) with the higher marks rewarded to students who do the harder problem solving questions correctly.

As a guide, your child should be performing 1-2 grades above their current grade in both Maths and English. This means an A to A+ in order to be considered somewhat competitive as candidates who sit the exam are most likely to be at that level already.

Academic Assessment Services scholarship exams are even harder in selection compared to their exams for selective schools. This is because a scholarship may provide 1-3 spots a year while selective schools often have 225 spots or more.

Because the savings for a scholarship can run to more than $44,244 over 6 years from Grade 7 – 12, the stakes are high and so is the competition.

Many children commonly put in 168+ hours of preparation 6 months ahead of test date.

I have personally seen instances where naturally gifted students missed out to someone who was prepared because they had poor exam technique (just because you are gifted doesn’t mean that you naturally have good exam technique).

It would be unfair to put your child into the Academic Assessment Services exam without preparation. It is a time-driven exam and totally different from what they get at school.

If you don’t prepare, your child goes in the test at a disadvantage. Get them help so they go into the test knowing what to do and how to do their best.

What’s in an Academic Assessment Services exam – test format, number of questions and time limit?

An Academic Assessment Services exam generally has 4 parts although schools can customise for their own needs. Robert Allwell, the director of Academic Assessment Services has stated that:

Mathematic tasks are heavily weighted to reasoning rather than simply learned skills, and reading comprehension tasks are weighted to reward interpretation, inference and synthesis.

And for writing, he stated that ‘examiners look for originality, adherence to the topic, fluency and strong control of syntax, grammar and vocabulary in the writing component of tests’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 2018)

It is important to note that for any scholarship test, rote learning and memorizing multiplication tables, questions or formulas, isn’t going to give your child the edge they need. Instead, developing strong reasoning skills, having a strategy for writing and exam technique will be useful to help your child answer questions quickly and correctly and this is what Exam Success focusses on.

The 4 parts along with their description (including time limits and estimated number of questions per test *) are shown below:

﹡ The number of questions and time limit have been estimated from the Academic Assessment Services website and publicly available information. Please note that the authoritative body can change the number of questions and time limits from year to year so please refer to their websites for the most up to date information. Time per question is calculated by taking the time limit divided by number of questions.

﹡﹡ Calculated as the identified cost of private school tuition fees of $36,870 per year for inner suburb of capital city multiplied by 20%.

As you'll see, the scholarship test is heavily weighted towards reasoning i.e. thinking skills rather than curriculum – this means you’ll need test preparation that teaches logical reasoning. Logical reasoning is unfamiliar to many parents but it can be taught and is a study area under ‘logic’ a branch of study under philosophy. Our courses and test questions are developed by one of our exam experts who majored in philosophy and studied logic reasoning from a logic professor at the renowned University of Melbourne.

Your child needs support and expert programs designed around building skills in reasoning that they don’t teach you at school. These are the skills that will help your child answer those hard questions they get the highest marks for. Most children can answer the easier questions but it’s the harder questions that help your child get selected for a scholarship.

How Do You Prepare Your Kid For the Academic Assessment Services Scholarship Test?

Because the questions reward children who can do problem solving, the questions are rarely straightforward. They require reasoning skills - something that is rarely taught in schools.

So how can your child prepare?

The first step is to do sample question papers. While Academic Assessment Services do not release past papers, we have found that there are a number of ways you can test logical reasoning and have created our own set of questions – that have been used by students to prepare for an Academic Assessment Services exam and successfully gain a scholarship.

You can sign up to the teaching test bank here - select 'test papers'.

When I do private tuition, the process I use to help students gain a scholarship involves just 5 steps!

For reading, mathematical reasoning and abstract reasoning:

1. Do a practice test disregarding the time limit. Focus on getting the question right and find out what your score is in the end.
2. For any question you didn’t get correct, figure out what should be the correct answer (and check it with your answer key).
3. For those same questions, come up with strategies so that when you’re faced with a similar question next time, you’ll be able to answer it. Hone your strategy over time so that you reduce the number of steps it takes to get to the answer (and so that you can answer the question more quickly).
4. Repeat steps 1 – 3 until you get a score of 95-100%. Each time you repeat it, if done properly, your child should be seeing a higher score in their practice test.
5. Then do practice tests within the time limit. What you’ll find is that working in a time limit is easier, once you have a process to answering various questions correctly.

While they look like 5 easy steps, going through each step does time a long time if done properly and coming up with strategies takes time. The strategy that has the least step is the quickest way there but it requires clear thought and understanding around logical links. You can develop these strategies yourself, or you can do our courses where these strategies are provided.

Written Expression is a bit trickier as there are so many ways where your writing can lose marks (we’ve identified 52!).

Based on our experience helping students get scholarships, we’ve found that students improve dramatically and quickly through targeted feedback. Writing improves quickly when you have experts providing feedback. Your child shouldn’t have to sit in class and learn grammar rules, but rather, they should:

1. Write their essay
2. Get customized feedback.
3. Repeat steps 1-2 again. Using the feedback, overtime, students see an improvement in their essays. They stop making the same mistakes and their writing is better.

A scholarship is much sought after – it provides parents and children with access to the most prestigious and top schools at a reduced price (savings usually $40,000 over 6 years). It is a lifetime opportunity that provides your child with endless benefits.

Here's test preparation designed for your child's success