ICAS Year 12 test
Track your students’ abilities and improve your teaching
ICAS is an historic Year 12 academic competition that challenges and motivates students. But for teachers, it provides a goldmine of insights that validate your students’ strengths and weaknesses, and what you might do to address them.
The ICAS Year 12 assessments are created by a team of experienced psychometricians, teachers, and education measurement experts. They use the nation’s curriculum as a guide when creating the questions for Australia, New Zealand and other countries that participate in the competition.
What the ICAS Year 12 test will tell you about your students
How your students’ performance compares against their peers
How your students’ skill level compares to their expected year level grade
Your students’ strengths and weaknesses for each subject and sub-skill
Which students may need a little extra support, or extra work
Whether you may need to create new gifted and talented classes or support classes
How your students’ performance is trending from year to year
ICAS Year 12 test subjects
The ICAS exam papers change for depending on your country and students’ year levels. To locate the correct papers for the Year 12 test, check out our “Exam papers by year level” table here.
The Year 12 test for ICAS English is broken down into four categories: text comprehension, writer’s craft, syntax and vocabulary.
Students are expected to identify content like points of conflict, understand or explain things such as changes of perspective, analyse the impact of certain word choices and more.
The Year 12 competition for Mathematics tests the subject’s core skills, including number & arithmetic, algebra & patterns, space & geometry, and chance & data.
They may be asked to apply index laws to simplify expressions, solve problems with small time scales, use two-step probability, and solve a variety of other challenging mathematical problems suitable for their year level.
The Year 12 assessment for Science tests students’ abilities to observe and measure, interpret scientific data, predict and conclude, investigate issues, and reason/problem solve.
They may be faced with challenges that requires them to measure microscopic objects, classify animals by sub-species, calculate refraction angles and more.
The Year 12 test for ICAS Writing assesses students on one of two forms of common writing: persuasive writing, where they may be required to write something like an opinion piece or campaign manifesto, and narrative writing, where they’ll find themselves writing character descriptions, narrative complications, setting descriptions or something else.
Their writing is marked based on their command of genre, textual grammar and syntax/punctuation.