Free ACER Scholarship Practice Questions (Year 7 Entry)

Scholarship registrations tend to close months before the sitting, which means most families book the ACER Scholarship Test long before anyone in the house has seen a question. The gap is uncomfortable, and it's easy to fill with speculation.

The cheapest fix is to try a few. Below are free ACER-style Mathematics questions for Year 7 entry. Tap a choice to grade it instantly and read the worked solution — no account, no cost.

Number and calculation

The Mathematics section covers number, measurement, geometry and statistics at a Year 6 level, with no calculator. What distinguishes it from a classroom test is that the arithmetic is usually easy once you've worked out which arithmetic to do. These two warm up that muscle: a place-value read on a seven-digit number, and a map-scale problem where the work is setting up the multiplication, not doing it.

Fractions and ratios

Fractions, decimals, percentages and proportional reasoning turn up repeatedly. The first of these asks what fraction is left once a share has been eaten — subtraction dressed as a story; the second scales a ratio, which is a move worth being fluent with at this level.

Time the section, not the questions

The demand in this test isn't only difficulty — it's sustained concentration. ACER's own component descriptions put Humanities at 40–45 multiple-choice questions and Mathematics at 32–36, each with four options marked A to D, plus a Written Expression component of two topics. ACER publishes no duration for either multiple-choice component, so any Humanities or Mathematics time quoted online is an estimate rather than an official figure; for the writing, ACER's example-questions booklet mentions "the 25 minutes allowed" without saying whether that covers one topic or both.

Four questions answered at leisure tell you very little about that. If you want a genuinely useful read, do this instead: set a timer, give your child a longer set, and watch what the clock does to them.

• Do they abandon a hard question? Moving on and coming back is one of the few habits that transfers to any timed section, and it's a decision most eleven-year-olds have never been asked to make.
• Does accuracy change under time? Some children slow down and stay correct; others speed up and start misreading the question. Both are worth knowing about, and neither is fixed.
• What happens at the end? Rushing the last five questions and rushing the first five have different fixes.

None of this is a score, and it shouldn't be treated as one. It's a list of things to work on, which is all a practice session can honestly give you.

The other two components

Humanities — ACER calls it Comprehension and Interpretation — covers written and visual material including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, diagrams and maps, testing main ideas and detail, inference, vocabulary in context, and reading visual information alongside text. Questions come in units, with several sharing one text, so they work better in a full practice set than as standalone snippets; the free ACER practice test includes them with the passage attached.

Written Expression is two topics, which ACER presents as two separate tests so students use different styles of writing. Each gives a stimulus — a picture, a statement, or both — and the piece can be a story, a description, an explanation or an argument. ACER's rule is the thing to teach: the stimulus must be the basis of the writing, and a student is penalised if the piece doesn't seem to be developed from it. So the useful rehearsal is unglamorous and repeated: hand over a picture or a statement, spend two or three minutes planning from it, write, then read it back. Two short pieces in a sitting is closer to the real thing than one long one.

Before you practise anything, check the school

Each school sets its own scholarship criteria, may weight the sections differently, and combines the ACER result with an interview and current school reports — the test result is typically the first filter rather than the whole decision. Registration deadlines often close months before the sitting. Cooperative schools all test on one date ACER sets for a Saturday in February — Saturday 27 February 2027 for 2028 entry — and a candidate sits once for up to six of them; schools on the alternative date program run their own sitting instead, which is how some families end up sitting more than once in a season.

ACER publishes general information and official practice materials on its scholarships page; the school's admissions office is the authority on dates, deadlines and what its scholarship actually covers.

Keep going

• A full free set. The free ACER Scholarship practice test has Humanities and Mathematics questions to try, with instant feedback, still no account. Written Expression is a writing task rather than a set of questions, so it isn't part of the free sample.
• The format in detail. ACER Scholarship Test (Year 7 entry): format and samples walks through the three components and how selection works.
• Working out which test you're facing. Year 7 scholarship tests: which one will your child sit? maps the ACER test, HAST and school-run exams against each other.
• Also looking at a selective place? Selective place or scholarship? compares the two Year 6 pathways and what preparation is shared.

Twenty minutes a few times a week over a term does more for familiarity and nerves than a heavy fortnight before the sitting. The point of practice at this age is that the paper feels ordinary by the time it matters.