◂◂ SCHOLARSHIPS · THE AAS PAPER
Ten of the eighteen Perth scholarship schools we track set a paper from Academic Assessment Services. Here is what is in it, what each section is really testing, how the timing and the dates work, and what preparing well looks like — from a WA teacher who writes AAS-style practice for a living.
R2 Education is not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by Academic Assessment Services. What follows is a teacher’s description of the paper’s published shape, for families deciding what to prepare for. Where a school’s own candidate information says something different from this page, the school is right and this page is out of date — tell us and we will fix it.
Academic Assessment Services (AAS) is one of three companies that write and mark scholarship entrance exams for Australian independent schools. The other two are ACER and EduTest. A school chooses one provider, and every scholarship candidate at that school sits that provider’s paper.
In the eastern states ACER and EduTest dominate, which is why almost every scholarship practice book in a bookshop, and almost every online course, is written for one of those two. Perth is different. Of the eighteen Perth scholarship schools we track, ten set an AAS paper, one (St George’s) sets EduTest, one (Trinity) writes its own paper, and not one names ACER.
The practical consequence: a WA family that buys the practice book on the shelf is, more often than not, preparing their child for an exam that child will never sit. The Perth dates table shows which provider each school uses, so you can check before you buy anything — from us or anyone else.
An AAS scholarship paper has four sections. They are sat on one morning, each separately timed, in an order the school’s candidate information sets out.
Verbal, figural and numerical reasoning, blended in a single section rather than split into separate tests. The one families have usually never seen anything like.
Passages of different kinds, with questions on what the text says, what it implies, what a word means where it sits, and why the writer made the choices they made.
Curriculum mathematics for the entry level, weighted towards problems that take more than one step and towards reading the question correctly.
A timed piece of writing in response to a prompt. Marked on ideas, structure and control of language, not on handwriting or length for its own sake.
The point to hold onto is the proportion. Reasoning and Problem Solving is the biggest block of marks and the least like anything a child does at school. Reading and Mathematics look familiar but are pitched to separate strong students from very strong ones. Written Expression is one piece, done once, against the clock. Good preparation spends its time in that order of priority.
This is the section that makes the AAS paper the AAS paper. It runs to around sixty questions and it mixes three kinds of reasoning together rather than presenting them as separate tests:
Because the three are interleaved, the section rewards a child who can switch modes without losing rhythm, who recognises quickly which kind of question is in front of them, and who does not sink four minutes into one figural puzzle when there are fifty-nine others. That is a skill, it is teachable, and it is almost never taught — because the ACER and EduTest material on the market presents reasoning in separately-timed, single-type blocks that never ask for it.
Untimed first, to learn the question types and how to think about each one. Then mixed, timed sets that look like the real section — the three kinds shuffled together — so that pace and switching get practised, not just accuracy. And for every question, a worked explanation that shows the fastest sound route, not just the answer letter. A child who understands why the pattern works can do the next one; a child who only knows they got it wrong cannot.
The reading section presents passages of several kinds — narrative, informational, sometimes poetry or persuasive text — and asks questions at more than one depth:
Children applying for scholarships are almost always strong readers already. The section is not testing whether they can read; it is testing whether they read precisely under time pressure — going back to the text for evidence rather than answering from memory or from what feels right. The commonest lost marks are on questions the child could have answered, but answered from impression rather than from the line in front of them.
The mathematics section covers curriculum content for the entry level, but it does not present it the way a classroom test does. Expect:
As a maths teacher, this is the section where I see the least difference between a scholarship child and a good ordinary student in what they know, and the most difference in how they read. The preparation that moves the needle is not more content; it is the habit of slowing down for the first ten seconds of every question and speeding up afterwards. Whether a calculator or any other equipment is permitted is set out in the school’s candidate information — check it rather than assume.
One prompt, a fixed time, one piece of writing. The prompt may be a topic, a picture, a sentence to continue or a question to argue. It is marked on:
The two habits that lift a scholarship piece are both about time: a plan in the first two or three minutes, so the piece has a destination before it starts, and a stop two minutes before the end to read it back and fix what a reader would trip on. Length is not a criterion. A shorter piece with a shape beats a longer one that runs out of road.
Each section is separately timed. The exact minutes per section are stated in the candidate information each school sends out before the day, and we deliberately do not reprint them here: they are AAS’s and the school’s to state, they can differ between year levels, and they can change from one year to the next. Read the school’s letter and believe it over any website, including this one.
What we can say about timing is its shape. The Reasoning and Problem Solving section is the longest and has the most questions, so it is where pace matters most. The writing section is the one where children most often lose time to a slow start. And the morning as a whole is long for a child — four separately-timed sections in a row, in an unfamiliar room. Practising a full paper end to end at least once, under something like real conditions, is worth more than another week of isolated drills.
Because each school runs its own sitting, applying to three AAS schools means three registrations, three fees and three exam mornings, typically inside the same fortnight in February. The paper is the same format each time, so the preparation carries over completely — but the stamina does not. Plan the fortnight, not just the first date.
Unlike some other providers’ programmes, AAS does not run a single national test date. Each school sets its own. In Perth that means the sittings cluster across roughly a fortnight rather than landing on one Saturday, and each school has its own application window, its own fee and its own registration.
Scholarship season runs roughly October to February: applications open in the spring, and most Perth testing happens in February of the year before entry. It is the opposite end of the year from NAPLAN and OLNA, so the two never collide.
We keep the Perth scholarship dates in one free table — school, provider, application window, test date, year levels — and re-check it against each school’s own page every season. Always confirm with the school before you rely on a date; theirs is the authoritative one.
No provider releases past papers. Not AAS, not ACER, not EduTest. The papers are reused, their security is the providers’ business, and a real one has never been legitimately published.
That has one consequence that every family should hear plainly: all scholarship practice material on the market is “style” material, written by someone who has studied the published shape of the paper and built practice to match. That includes the providers’ own practice tests, it includes every bookshop title, and it includes ours. Anyone selling “real past papers” is selling something else.
What separates good style material from bad is how closely it tracks the real paper’s format and proportions, and how much the child learns from each question they attempt. Which brings us to preparation.
From a teacher’s side of the desk, having watched a lot of bright children prepare for the wrong thing:
The official AAS practice tests are the right place to start, and we say so. But they give instant correct-or-incorrect feedback only. A tick or a cross tells a child what happened; it does not tell them why, or what to do next time.
Our AAS-style packs are built on one idea: every question has a full worked explanation, written by a teacher. For a figural pattern, that means the rule and how to spot it fast. For a maths problem, the setup and the trap. For a reading question, the line in the passage the answer rests on. For writing, feedback against the same four things the section is marked on.
R2 Education is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by Academic Assessment Services, ACER, or EduTest. “AAS”, “ACER” and “EduTest” are used on this page only to identify which provider’s paper a school sets, and all trademarks belong to their respective owners. Our material is AAS-style practice written independently by R2 Education; it is not, and does not contain, any provider’s paper.