ACER Scholarship Test 2027: Dates, Registration & How It Works

If a scholarship is part of your plan for Year 7, the ACER Scholarship Test is most likely the exam involved — and the part that catches families out is not the test. It is the calendar. Registrations close weeks before the sitting, and late applications are not accepted.

For the next round, applications open on Monday 21 September 2026. This is a plain guide to the dates, how registration works, and what is actually on the paper.

The dates

First, a naming point that confuses almost everyone: the sitting held in February 2027 is for 2028 entry. Your child sits the test in Year 6 and takes up the place the following year.

ACER runs two programs, and the dates differ:

	Cooperative (Qld, NSW, NT, WA and Victorian schools)	ACEP (South Australia)
Applications open	Monday 21 September 2026	Monday 21 September 2026
Applications close	Sunday 7 February 2027	Friday 22 January 2027
Test date	Saturday 27 February 2027	Saturday 6 February 2027

Separately from both, schools on the alternative date program choose their own date during the school year — most Victorian schools do this — so their deadlines are their own and are not on the table above.

Two practical consequences. Registrations close well before the sitting, and late applications are not accepted, so the deadline is the real date in your diary rather than the test day. And because dates change every cycle, confirm anything here against the official ACER Scholarships page and the school's own admissions page before you rely on it.

What the test is, and who sits it

The ACER Scholarship Test is run by the Australian Council for Educational Research. ACER describes it as used by approximately 250 independent schools across Australia to award academic scholarships. What a scholarship is worth varies widely from school to school — some cover full tuition, others a portion of it — so the school's own admissions office is the place to ask.

ACER's Level 1 covers students entering Year 7 or Year 8. This post is about the Year 7 entry sitting, which students usually take in Year 6. Schools also use ACER tests at other entry levels, so check with each school which level and sitting applies before you plan anything.

How registration works

The mechanics follow from which program a school is on, which is why the first job is not booking anything — it is asking each school on your list, "cooperative or alternative date?"

• Cooperative schools all test on the one national Saturday in February. Your child sits once, and a single cooperative registration can cover up to six schools, with the result going to each of them.
• Alternative-date schools run their own sitting and need their own registration, and the result goes to that school only. This is how families end up sitting more than once in a season — usually a mix of cooperative schools plus one alternative-date school.

ACER publishes the cycle dates and official practice materials on its scholarships page; the school's admissions office is the authority on its own deadlines, its program, and what its scholarship actually covers. If you are choosing between schools partly on cost, ask that last question early — some scholarships cover full tuition and others only part of it, and some schools separately offer bursaries for families demonstrating financial need.

What is on the paper

Level 1 has three components. ACER's own component descriptions give the question counts:

Component	Questions	Format
Humanities (Comprehension and Interpretation)	40–45	Multiple-choice, four options A–D, grouped in units of several questions per text
Mathematics	32–36	Multiple-choice, four options A–D, no calculator
Written Expression	2 topics	Two stimulus-based pieces, set as two separate tests

Humanities asks questions about written and visual material drawn from areas such as English, Art, History, Geography and Social Studies — fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, diagrams and maps. No subject knowledge is assumed; everything needed is printed on the paper. The structural feature that matters is the unit: several questions share one text or image, so reading efficiently once and answering several questions from it is the skill being paid for.

Mathematics is described by ACER as measuring mathematical ability rather than school achievement, with material drawn from a wide variety of sources that may differ from standard classroom materials. In practice that means multi-step reasoning — interpreting information, working out which calculation is even needed — more than rote arithmetic.

Written Expression sets two topics and presents them as two separate tests, so students use different styles of writing. Each gives a stimulus — a picture, a statement, or both — and the response can be a story, a description, an explanation, or a point of view. About one and a half A4 pages of ruled paper are provided for each piece, but no length is required; ACER's position is that quality matters more than length. Markers consider thought and content, structure and organisation, and expression, style and mechanics.

One ACER rule outweighs every preparation tip in this component: the stimulus material must be the basis of the writing, and a student is penalised if the piece does not appear to be developed from the stimulus. A polished, pre-learned story dropped onto the page is the most expensive mistake available here.

Three questions to try

Reading about a format is not the same as seeing one. Below are three free questions in the styles the paper uses — one that asks the student to read a graph, the kind of visual material Humanities draws on, and two maths questions. Tap a choice to grade it and read the worked solution.

Notice that the maths is not hard arithmetic — it is a short chain of reasoning with easy numbers at the end of it. That is the scholarship-test signature.

What ACER does not publish

Worth knowing, because it is quoted confidently in a lot of places: ACER publishes no duration for either multiple-choice component. Any Humanities or Mathematics timing you see online — including in preparation materials, ours included — is an estimate rather than an official figure. For Written Expression, ACER's example-questions booklet refers to "the 25 minutes allowed" to plan and edit, without stating whether that covers one topic or both.

If exact timing matters to your planning, the school or the official practice materials in your ACER account are the places to ask. In the meantime, the honest way to prepare for pace is to practise a long set in one sitting rather than to rehearse a stopwatch figure nobody can source.

How schools use the result

Each school sets its own scholarship criteria and may weight the components differently. Most combine the ACER result with a school interview and current school reports — but the test result is typically the first filter, and students generally need to reach a threshold before being invited to interview.

That is worth holding lightly in both directions. The test is not the whole decision, and it is also not a formality.

A sensible run-up

• Sort the calendar first. Confirm each school's program and deadline before you plan any practice. Which sittings your child needs changes what preparation is even relevant.
• Read widely. Humanities draws on diverse text types, so regular reading across fiction, non-fiction and media does more than any worksheet.
• Practise with the text attached. Because questions come in units, a passage with several questions on it is closer to the real thing than a run of unrelated one-offs.
• Build mental maths fluency, then reasoning. There is no calculator, so number sense and estimation matter — but multi-step problems are what the paper actually rewards.
• Rehearse writing from a stimulus, twice. Hand over a picture or a statement, plan from it for two or three minutes, write, then read it back. Two shorter pieces in a session mirrors the real structure better than one long one.
• Keep it short and regular. Twenty focused minutes several times a week across a term does more for familiarity and nerves than a heavy fortnight in February.

Where to check

ACER publishes cycle dates, general information and official practice materials on its scholarships page. Each school publishes its own program, deadlines and scholarship terms. Between them, those two are the authority — everything else, including this page, is a summary that can go stale.

If you would like to see more of the question styles, you can try free ACER-style sample questions across Humanities and Mathematics. For a fuller walk-through of the three components, see our guide to the ACER Scholarship Test format; if you are still working out which exam your child will actually sit, Year 7 scholarship tests: which one? maps the options against each other.