TIPS FOR 2025 STUDENTS DOOING VICTORIAN SELECTIVE ENTERY

Hi everyone, I thought that creating a post were the next year of students writing the selective entry exam could ask questions and we could share our experiences to help this hopefully get into their dream school. As a student who got into Mac Rob first round, I advise going to tuition. I personally went to Melbourne tutorials the whole of yr7 and then I joined scholarly for the first few months of yr8 and just a month before the exam I joined JAC. I have heard lots of positive things about Henderson's (although a little costly) I think its worth it. These 4 tutors will all give you significant skills in order to ace the selective exam. Many people say that 2-3 months is enough but that depends on how you put your time ( some ppl may need 1 or 2 years )into it because I know many people I know had a lot of commitments like travelling overseas or extra-ciricular activities. Although these skills and moments may be great milestones, when you enter year 8 I strongly believe you should dedicate 75% of your time (other than school) to studying and revising. By the end of year 7, you should master topics which r covered in the yr 8 curriculum ( and atleast touch base and learn the basics of some topics in yr9-10 however in our test there was many only yr8 topics but you never know as Acer tends to give a lot of surprises ). In yr 8 you should start improving your timing but doing sample tests (JAC tends to give sample tests every week which helps for time managment and overall struture of the exam). For writing its just practice. I advise to purchase like 6 of 1 type of pen that you are comfortable with so you can practice with that pen when you are doing sample mock tests and keep 2 for the real exam. For writing its all about time management so I recommend having someone or some app to give you some writing prompts (I advice to use ChatGPT as it was very helpful to get free resorces from, just ask it to generate 50 prompts and it will give you). You should also select 1 peice of writing that you are most comfortable with bc in the 40 time frame you have to write a persuasive and narrative so it doesn't matter how much time you spend on each. I think you should try to finish one piece in around 17-20 mins. The first piece you are writing should ideally be the strong out of the 2 bc if you don't finish the 2nd one then you atleast have the strongest piece to boost you marks. For reading comp you need to understand how to skim and scan quickly over long texts, understand poem hiding meanings and understand cartoons hidden message. For the ability tests comes practice bc compared to the other 3, you get very few time to do one questions, VR requires a broad vocab so I advise to have a vocab book (I had one in yr 8 and I was on by third book by the exam day). Just write the meaning and some synonyms or maybe a sentence so you can comfortably know the word. For NR its is spamming tests and learning how to understand and break down a large paragraph of info and quickly identifying patterns.

That's all for now ( I know this is very long ), I will provide more resources and tips when the exam is getting closer. Feel free to ask if you have anymore questions

DOGLOVER3
Thank you. Hopefully you get in as well. I have heard spectrum is good. However, I would reccomend Henderson's atleast for the last term b4 the exam bc apparently come content on the test was covered in spectrum (including the narrative writing prompt) but spectrums is a good tuition as well from what I have heard.

1. As clover said I used webistes like vocabulary.com and chat GPT (asked it to generate some random words for yr9). But try to read articles from the news (beneficial for writing as writing topics are generally around current affairs) and if you see any hard word note them down and take some time to understand the word. Even when you you are reading a normal book you don't have to search up the word straight away but you can note it down and check it out later.
2. the maths test was far most one of the most difficult test. Even though all the content was within the boundaries of yr 8 (touching very little graph questions from yr9), the questions itself were very lengthy worded problems or diagrams which had to be artculated. For maths, understanding what the questions is actually asking and forgetting about the unnecessary info is required. Also NR was another hard test as there wasn't much time and this topic can only be perfected by practice and if not regularly then alternative days doing some pattern identification questions (some easy marks should be straightforward ones like Fibonacci). Remember timing is the key so improve on your accuracy and then focus on timing and attempting to answers questions in 30-45 secs ( no more than 45 secs for NR but for maths maybe a minute but its a stretch). Overall in maths, we had questions on probability, algebra and a few graph questions.
3. answered by (clover ) but just to add on to the persuasive, we had 2 graphs and 2 statements and we had to pick 1 statement ( for or against cinemas ) and 2 graphs which we could use if we wanted to (in persuasive if graphs do come up then the recommend you using it as it not only becomes one of your evidence in the TEEL structure but also shows the assessor's that you can understand information.

Good luck next year and hopefully you get in and we see each other some time.