For Years 5 and 6 students preparing for the NSW Selective High School Placement Test
— WORKSHEET START —
The practice questions below are organised into three tiers. Your tutor will direct you to the right starting point.
[Foundation] if unusual prompts are still confusing, or you are new to Selective preparation, start here. [Core] if you can write a structured persuasive paragraph independently, start here. [Extension] if you write confidently and want to develop the analytical depth that separates a strong response from an excellent one, start here.
7. Practice Questions
Tier 1, Foundation
Q1. Which of the following best explains what the prompt Silence is more powerful than words is asking you to do?
- Write a story about a character who becomes silent. B. Argue that silence communicates more effectively than spoken or written language in certain situations. C. Describe the difference between silence and words. D. Compare two characters, one who speaks freely and one who does not.
Answer: ______ Because: _______________________
Q2. Mark each sentence below as either C (contention) or T (topic sentence).
___ Students should be allowed to grade their teachers because they have direct daily experience of whether teaching is working.
___ One reason students are better placed than observers to evaluate teaching is that they experience the consequences of poor explanation every lesson.
___ Failure is more important than success because it provides information that success cannot.
___ The third reason failure matters is that it forces a person to examine their assumptions rather than repeat what worked before.
Q3. In each pair below, underline the stronger opening sentence.
A: In this essay I will argue that boredom is important for children. B: When was the last time you were genuinely bored, with nothing to reach for and no screen to fill the silence?
A: I think children should be allowed to vote because it is not fair that they are excluded. B: The decisions made by elected governments today will shape the next fifty years. The people who will spend those fifty years in full are currently in school. They have no vote.
A: Kindness is not weak. In fact it is the opposite. B: The claim that kindness is weakness rests on a particular understanding of strength. That understanding is wrong.
Q4. Here is a concession and refutation. Identify what is wrong with it, then rewrite it.
Some people think technology is good for learning, but they are wrong and I disagree.
What is wrong: _______________________
Rewritten version: _______________________
Q5. When you receive a Selective exam prompt you personally disagree with, you should:
- Write a narrative instead, since stories do not require a personal opinion. B. Argue both sides equally so the examiner can see you have considered the issue. C. Choose whichever position you can argue more convincingly, regardless of your personal view. D. Write a brief response explaining why you disagree with the prompt.
Answer: ______ Because: _______________________
Q6. Identify what is wrong with this response to the prompt Failure is more important than success.
I think failure and success are both important. Failure helps you learn and success makes you feel good. Both are needed in life and neither is more important. In conclusion, failure and success are equally important.
Problem: _______________________
Tier 2, Core
Q1. Decode the following prompt and write a planning framework. Do not write the full response.
The most dangerous ideas are the ones that seem reasonable.
Decoded: _______________________ Contention: _______________________ Argument 1 and example: _______________________ Argument 2 and example: _______________________ Concession: _______________________ Refutation: _______________________ Final sentence: _______________________
Q2. Rewrite this contention so it is more specific and more persuasive.
Prompt: Books should have no pictures. Weak: I think books should not have pictures because pictures are not good for reading.
Stronger version: _______________________
Q3. Explain why the traffic rules analogy in the text analysis passage is more effective than a direct statement of the same argument would be.
Q4. Improve this concession and refutation. The current version does not genuinely acknowledge the opposing argument.
Some people argue the internet has provided benefits. However I still think it has done more harm than good.
Improved version: _______________________
Q5. Write an opening paragraph for the following prompt. Begin with a specific concrete example.
Curiosity is more valuable than knowledge.
Q6. Analyse the final sentence from Prompt 9’s sample response: Strength is the capacity to act in line with your values when doing so is genuinely difficult. What is this sentence doing, and why does it work as a conclusion?
Q7. Using Prompt 9 as your example, explain why a student might choose to argue against an unusual prompt rather than for it, and when this strategy might not be the best choice.
Q8. Improve this conclusion to a response arguing that children should have the right to vote.
In conclusion I have explained why I think children should be allowed to vote. These are all good reasons and I hope one day the law will change. Thank you for reading.
Improved: _______________________
Tier 3, Extension
Q1. A student claims: “In the Selective exam you should always argue against an unusual prompt, the against position is safer and more logical.” Evaluate this claim in three to four sentences. Use specific examples from this guide in your evaluation.
Q2. Write a complete persuasive response (four to five paragraphs) to the prompt below. Plan before you write. Include a contention, two developed arguments with specific examples, a genuine concession and refutation, and a deliberate conclusion.
The most important lessons are the ones nobody teaches you.
Planning notes:
Full response:
Q3. Compare the opening strategies used in Prompt 1 and Prompt 10. Identify the technique used in each. Explain why each technique suits its specific prompt. Then justify which you find more effective.
Q4. A student runs out of time and submits a response with no conclusion. How significantly has this damaged their mark? Refer specifically to what examiners are looking for in a high-scoring response.
Q5. Write an opening and a conclusion for the prompt We should not always say what we think. The opening must begin by defining a key term. The conclusion must end with a final sentence that does not summarise the argument.
Opening:
Conclusion:
Q6. Evaluate the sample response to Prompt 8. Identify three specific things the student did well. Then identify one section you would revise, explain why, and write the improved version.
8. Writing Task
Choose one prompt. You have 25 minutes: three for planning, nineteen for writing, three for proofreading.
Option A: Making mistakes is the most important part of growing up. Option B: Losing teaches more than winning. Option C: The things we take for granted are the things that matter most.
Your response must open without “In this essay” or “I am going to argue.” It must state a clear contention, develop two body paragraphs with specific examples, include a genuine concession and refutation, and close with a final sentence that is deliberate rather than trailing.
Prompt chosen: _______ Decoded in one sentence: _______________________
Planning notes:
Full response:
9. Three Mistakes That Come Up Every Time
Mistake 1: Presenting both sides instead of arguing one
I think failure and success are both important. Failure helps you learn and success gives you confidence. Both are needed in life.
This is a discussion. The exam is asking for persuasion, which means committing to a position and building a case for it. Acknowledging the other side has a place. It is called a concession, and it belongs in the body of your response after you have already committed to your argument. It does not belong in your opening, and it should never be your conclusion.
Mistake 2: Writing before you have decoded the prompt
Every word written before you understand what the prompt is asking is a word that may need to be abandoned. An unusual prompt requires a minute of reading before a word is written. One sentence in the margin: This prompt is asking me to argue that… If you cannot complete it, stop and read again. This step is not optional for unusual prompts.
Mistake 3: Writing a concession that is just a dismissal
Some people think the internet has done more good than harm, but they are wrong.
This is not a concession. A concession is a genuine acknowledgment that the other side has a point, followed by an explanation of why that point does not change your conclusion. “They are wrong” restates your own position without engaging with theirs. Examiners reading Selective responses notice the difference between a real concession and a dismissal wearing a concession’s clothes.
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ANSWER KEY AND TUTOR GUIDANCE, not for student distribution before completion
Section 5: Text Analysis
Q1: The student is arguing that rules do not limit freedom. They are what makes freedom meaningful and usable in practice.
Q2: Defining a key term works here because the prompt’s apparent logic depends on an oversimplified definition of freedom. If the reader accepts that definition without examination, the prompt seems correct by definition. By showing the definition is incomplete before arguing anything else, the student creates the space their argument needs. For abstract prompts, this is often the most effective opening move.
Q3: The road analogy turns an abstract philosophical claim into something physically imaginable. A reader who has no interest in political philosophy can still picture a road where everyone drives in any direction at any speed and recognise immediately that it produces paralysis rather than freedom. Without the analogy, the argument requires the reader to accept a logical claim. With it, the reader can see the claim is demonstrably true. That is a different kind of persuasion.
Q4: Three examples from different areas of life, safety, economics, education, establish that the argument is a general principle rather than a specific case that might be dismissed as unusual. One strong example can always be argued away as an exception. Three examples from unrelated domains create a pattern, and patterns are harder to dismiss.
Q5: Yes. The exam tests whether a student can construct a coherent argument, not whether they hold the correct position. Prompt 9 in this guide demonstrates this directly: arguing against the claim that kindness is weakness is the stronger strategic choice, and the response is effective precisely because it takes the claim seriously enough to examine and refute it. Arguing against a prompt is legitimate as long as it is done through argument rather than simple dismissal.
Section 6: Guided Practice
Exercise 1 model answers:
Prompt 1: This prompt asks me to argue that some of the most significant things in human life, love, fairness, courage, wellbeing, cannot be captured by measurements or data, and that this is a problem for systems that try to evaluate everything through numbers.
Prompt 2: This prompt asks me to argue that the desire to find out and question matters more than what you already know, possibly because curiosity drives the accumulation of knowledge while knowledge without curiosity stops growing.
Prompt 3: This prompt asks me to argue that in some situations, honesty should be weighed against other considerations, kindness, timing, the effect the truth would have on the person receiving it, and that saying everything you think is not always the right choice.
Exercise 2, tutor note: Check the planning framework against five elements: a decoded sentence that correctly identifies the claim, a contention that commits to a specific position (not just restates the topic), two arguments that each include a specific named example (not general claims), a concession that genuinely engages with the opposing view, and a concluding sentence that could function as the final line of a real response. The most common error is listing an example as an argument. An argument is a reason. An example supports it. Students should state the reason before the example.
Exercise 3 sample openings:
Concrete example: My grandfather left school at fourteen and spent the next decade making the kind of errors that only come from doing things without knowing what you are doing. The word he used for that period, fifty years later, was not embarrassing. The word he used was educational.
Defining a key term: A mistake and a failure are not the same thing. A failure is the absence of success. A mistake is something more specific, a decision or action taken without the knowledge that would have made a different outcome possible. That distinction matters, because it is only in the second category that learning is actually available.
Exercise 4 sample paragraph: Technology genuinely does produce better measured outcomes in some areas of learning, and the evidence for this in literacy and numeracy instruction is real, not invented. Treating it as irrelevant would be dishonest. But there is a difference between learning effectively inside a stimulation-rich environment and being able to think clearly when that environment is absent. A student who has only ever learned with constant technological support has not built the capacity to generate direction on their own. Boredom, in this context, is not a problem to be avoided. It is the specific condition that requires a student to find that capacity.
Section 7: Practice Questions
Tier 1:
Q1: B. The prompt is asking for an argued position on the relative communicative power of silence versus words, not a story, not a description, not a character comparison.
Q2: C / T / C / T. A contention covers the whole response. A topic sentence covers one paragraph within it.
Q3: In each pair, underline the B option. All three B options begin the argument without announcing they are doing so, use specific detail rather than vague claims, and avoid first-person opinion language.
Q4: The problem is that “they are wrong” does not explain why they are wrong. It restates the writer’s position without engaging with the opposing argument at all. A better version: “It is true that well-designed technology can improve engagement and outcomes in specific subjects, and this is documented and worth acknowledging. However, being engaged during a technology-supported lesson is not the same as being capable of thinking clearly when technology is unavailable. These are two different abilities, and current schooling develops only one of them.”
Q5: C. The exam measures whether you can argue convincingly, not whether your opinion is correct.
Q6: The response refuses to commit. It gives equal weight to both sides and concludes that neither is more important. This is a discussion, not a persuasive piece. The prompt is asking for an argument that one thing matters more than the other. Answering that they are equally important is, structurally, a non-answer.
Tier 2 model answers:
Q1: Decoded: This prompt asks me to argue that ideas which appear logical, balanced, or credible are more dangerous than obviously extreme ones, because they are more likely to be adopted before their flaws are recognised.
Sample contention: The history of the most damaging ideas is not primarily a history of extreme positions. It is a history of positions that sounded reasonable, used the language of evidence, and were adopted by institutions that would have rejected anything that announced itself as dangerous.
Argument 1: Reasonable-sounding ideas bypass scrutiny. Eugenic policies in the early twentieth century were framed using scientific language and positioned as progressive reform. Their apparent reasonableness allowed them into institutions, schools, hospitals, governments, that would never have accepted openly extreme positions.
Argument 2: Extreme ideas are more visible as threats. Misinformation containing obvious errors provokes immediate scepticism. Misinformation that uses selectively accurate statistics to support a false conclusion is far harder to detect and far more persuasive as a result.
Q2 sample: When a book provides an illustration of what the text has just described, it removes the reader’s obligation to construct that image independently, and in doing so removes the cognitive work that makes reading a genuinely developmental activity.
Q3: The analogy makes a philosophical claim physically imaginable. The reader does not need to engage with the theory to follow the example. They can picture the road immediately, and the conclusion (this produces paralysis, not freedom) is obvious without being stated. Direct argument asks the reader to accept a logical claim. An analogy lets the reader see the claim is true.
Q4 improved: The internet has enabled rapid communication, connected people across distances that previously made relationships difficult, and made educational materials available to people who would not otherwise have had access. These are genuine goods. But access to information only has value if the information is reliable, and the internet has made it structurally difficult to tell reliable information from its opposite. The benefit of access is real; its value is significantly reduced by the problem of trust.
Q5 sample: In 1831, Michael Faraday demonstrated electromagnetic induction without knowing what it would eventually make possible. He followed the question because the question interested him, not because he could see the destination. The electrical infrastructure that runs the modern world emerged from his curiosity, not from his knowledge of what to look for. Knowledge is a record of past inquiries. Curiosity is what starts the next one.
Q6: The sentence defines “strength” in precise terms and then shows that kindness, properly understood, satisfies that definition. It does not summarise the argument. It completes it. The structure (definition followed by immediate application) works because it is self-contained: you can read this sentence without the rest of the response and the argument is still there.
Q7: For Prompt 9, arguing for the claim, that kindness genuinely is weakness, requires the student to defend a position that most readers find morally objectionable, and to fight their scepticism throughout the response. Arguing against the claim allows the student to take the side the reader already leans toward, but requires genuine engagement with what makes the claim seem plausible (conflict avoidance mistaken for kindness) rather than simply asserting the obvious. The strategy is not “always argue against.” It is “choose the side you can argue most convincingly.” For some prompts, that is the against position. For others, like Prompt 1, the for position is itself the counterintuitive and more impressive choice.
Q8 improved: Democracy is built on the principle that people affected by decisions should have a say in making them. The decisions being made by governments today will determine the conditions under which children spend most of their lives. Adults will not live most of those years. Children will. Whether children should vote is not, at its core, a question about maturity. It is a question about whose future is actually at stake, and that answer has been obvious for longer than it has been acknowledged.
Tier 3 tutor notes:
Q1: The strongest responses will qualify the claim rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing with it. “Always” is the word that makes the claim wrong. For prompts like Prompt 9 or the text analysis passage, arguing against is clearly the stronger strategic choice. For Prompt 1, arguing for the unexpected position (boredom should be taught) is itself the counterintuitive move. The useful principle is: choose the position you can argue most convincingly, which requires assessing both sides before committing. Accept any response that identifies this with reference to a named example.
Q2: The five things to check: a contention that commits to a specific position (not just restates the topic), two body paragraphs that each contain a named specific example (not general claims), a concession that genuinely engages with the value of formal education (not just “some people think school is important”), a refutation that explains the limitation of that concession, and a final sentence that does not summarise the body paragraphs. The most common gap in Extension responses is the concession. Students either omit it entirely or write a dismissal rather than an acknowledgment.
Q3: Prompt 1 uses a rhetorical question. Prompt 10 uses a specific concrete example developed in detail. The rhetorical question works for Prompt 1 because boredom is a universal experience. Every reader has been bored, and the question immediately makes the abstract topic personal. The concrete example works for Prompt 10 because preserving imperfect things is not immediately intuitive and requires a specific case to become tangible. The strongest evaluations will note that neither technique is universally superior. The choice depends on whether the topic is already within the reader’s experience.
Q4: A missing conclusion does real damage to the overall response. Structure is one of the primary marking criteria, and a response without a conclusion is structurally incomplete. More practically, the conclusion is where the response demonstrates that the argument has reached a point rather than simply stopped. That said, a strong body and a missing conclusion will score higher than a weak body and a weak conclusion. The practical advice: if time is very short, write at minimum two deliberate sentences rather than nothing. Even a single clear final statement is better than an argument that ends mid-paragraph.
Q5 sample opening: The phrase “what we think” is carrying more weight in this prompt than it appears to. It covers everything from opinions about minor daily matters to judgements about other people’s choices, about justice, about how the world should work. Whether we should always say what we think is not one question. It depends entirely on which of these categories you are in.
Sample conclusion: Language is not a neutral container for thought. A thought, kept inside, disappears when the moment that produced it passes. A sentence said out loud does not. The discipline of choosing which thoughts become sentences is not about hiding anything. It is about understanding that the words you release into a conversation belong to someone else the moment they leave you.
Q6: Three specific strengths: The opening uses a historical comparison (the pre-internet information environment) to frame the argument before the internet is named, which is original and contextual. “Access to noise” is a precise three-word formulation that captures the central claim in a way an examiner will remember. The final paragraph distributes harm by vulnerability, which is the most sophisticated analytical move in the response, going well beyond a list of harms.
One thing to revise: the third paragraph mentions techniques designed to create compulsive behaviour without naming any of them. A specific example makes this paragraph significantly stronger. Revised sentence: “The infinite scroll, for instance, the feature that removes the natural stopping point at the bottom of a page and keeps feeding content indefinitely, was modelled directly on the psychological mechanism that makes slot machines difficult to stop using. Each pull might produce something interesting. The uncertainty is what keeps the hand moving.”
What to look for when marking student work:
Foundation: Students should be able to tell a contention from a topic sentence, identify a stronger opening from a weaker one, and recognise when a response has failed to commit to a position. If a student cannot complete the contention/topic sentence distinction after working through the vocabulary section, sit with the sample responses and ask them to identify the contention in each before moving to practice questions.
Core: The main weakness at this level is arguing at the level of assertion. “Failure is important because it teaches you things” is an assertion. “Failure is important because it identifies the specific point at which a strategy stopped working, something success cannot do” is an argument. Push students to state the mechanism of the claim before they give the example. Once they can do this reliably, their examples become much more purposeful.
Extension: A student who simply agrees or disagrees with an evaluation question is working at Core level. Extension-level thinking produces qualified positions. It identifies the conditions under which a claim is true and the conditions under which it is not. In practical terms: look for sentences that begin “this is true when…” or “this holds unless…” If every evaluation answer is simply yes or no, the student needs practice with prompts that contain an “always” or “never” claim.
Common sticking points and how to address them:
Students who freeze on unusual prompts: Spend the first minute of every practice session, not just sessions on unusual prompts, decoding. Five prompts, one sentence each, in five minutes. No responses. Just the decoded sentence. The decoding habit has to be automatic before the exam. If it requires conscious effort in practice, it will not be available under pressure.
Students who balance instead of argue: Give them a timed exercise where they are told which side to take, removing the choice entirely. Once they have argued a position they did not choose, the principle that the quality of the argument matters more than the direction of the opinion becomes concrete rather than abstract.
Students who write dismissals instead of concessions: The two-sentence exercise works well. Give the opposing argument. Ask for exactly two sentences: one that genuinely acknowledges it, one that explains its limitation. Do not move to full responses until this is reliable.
Students who cannot engage with abstract prompts: Ask them to find a real example before planning anything. “Can you name one actual situation, from history or from life, where failure led to something better?” Once there is a concrete anchor, the abstract argument tends to follow.
