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
