ICAS Year 3 test

“As a teacher it’s easy to believe the hype about your own school, and you can lose your reference on “normal” progress. This is where I have found ICAS’s greatest strength. It provided me with objective assessment results that allowed me to directly compare my Year 3 students’ performance against their peers across the country. When combined with data from other assessments, this helped me to validate my programming decisions and intervention strategies – a goldmine!”

Get rich insights into your students’ learning

ICAS is an internationally-recognised, annual academic competition that yields rich insights into your students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Its main purpose is to recognise academic achievements, but the results data provided allows you to get a clearer understanding of how your students are performing for the core subjects, allowing you to adapt your lessons to suit their needs.

Every Year 3 test is written by psychometricians, education measurement experts and experienced teachers, who use the curriculum as a guide when creating them.

How the Year 3 test for ICAS can help you to understand your students’ needs

Compare their performance against their classmates and the rest of the school, to determine whether they’re on track.

Identify whether any students need a little extra help in class.

See students’ strengths and weaknesses, clearly marked for every key skill area.

Determine which students are performing below their grade, on par with their grade, or below their grade.

See which way your students’ academic performance is trending, and make the necessary adjustments.

Determine whether you need to set up new gifted and talented classes, or support classes.

ICAS Year 3 test subjects

The test papers for ICAS are different depending on year level and country. To identify the correct Year 2 assessment papers, please view our exam papers by year level page.

English

For the ICAS Year 3 exam for English, students are required to identify, understand, and explain information within texts, which tests the following key skills:

Syntax
Vocabulary
Writer’s craft
Text comprehension

Their tasks may include identifying events in sequence, stating the main purpose of a text, joining sentences together with conjunctions and more.

Mathematics

The Year 3 competition for ICAS Mathematics is designed to test students’ higher-order thinking skills, and covers areas such as:

Numbers
Arithmetic
Patterns
Pre-algebra
Units
Measurement
Space
Shape
Geometry

Science

The Year 3 assessment for Science covers five different skill areas:

Observing/measuring
Investigating
Interpreting
Predicting/concluding
Reasoning/problem solving

Students are expected to display competency for each of these, for topics such as life & living, energy & change and processed materials.

Digital Technologies

The Year 3 assessment for Digital Technologies aims to test skills such as formatting, multimedia, web concepts, operations, spreadsheets, and more. Students may need to create and edit documents, create simple slideshows, send and receive emails, interpret data in spreadsheets, and more.

Writing

The Year 3 competition for ICAS Writing aims to test a student’s grammar, syntax/punctuation, spelling, and whether they can write accurately for a specific genre.

The test is broken down into two areas: persuasive writing, in which the student must write in an influential way, and narrative writing which must include the key elements of a narrative, like characters and settings.

Spelling Bee

The Year 3 assessment for Spelling Bee tests for words in three different contexts: dictation, applying rules and conventions and error correction.

The words range from common to uncommon, typically spelt to unusually spelt. This aims to test their visual memory, sound-letter relationships, using parts of words to build “word families,” and using word origins to get the right answer.

Help your students prepare for ICAS with past papers

If you’re looking for a way to help your students succeed at their ICAS tests, past papers are one of the most effective ways to do so.

All year levels for ICAS

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

Year 6

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

Year 10

Year 11

Year 12

Want valuable data on how to improve your lessons?

The Year 3 ICAS tests give you rich insights into your students’ learning, helping to you to create valuable lesson plans, write detailed, specific reports, and have great information to use for parent/teacher interviews.