Curriculum Reference
- Selective Test Skill Category: Thinking Skills
- Question Type: All major question types covering Logical Reasoning, Argument Flaws, Patterns and Sequences, Coded Language, Cause and Effect, and Analogies
- Test Application: NSW Selective High School Placement Test, Thinking Skills section
- NSW Stage: Stage 3
- Year Level: Year 6
- Syllabus Reference: NSW Selective High School Placement Test format
Download Practice Worksheet
Skill Context
If you’ve been around our Gregory Hills sessions long enough, you’ll have seen the look. It happens roughly every March, when our new Year 6 cohort sits their first proper Thinking Skills practice paper. A bright kid, school marks all sitting nicely above average, English teacher saying lovely things at parent-teacher night, maths report card all ticks since Year 4. They take the paper, head down, scribble for half an hour, and at the end they look up with this slightly stunned face that says: I have no idea what just happened to me. Nineteen out of thirty, if we’re lucky. Sometimes seventeen.
Parents almost always read this as their child suddenly hitting a wall. They haven’t. The paper isn’t measuring what they’ve been doing well at school. It’s a different beast altogether. And not understanding that, going in, is the thing that makes the whole exam feel like it has been designed personally to torture your child.
Here is what is actually going on. The Thinking Skills section, thirty questions in thirty minutes, is testing a very specific cognitive trick: can your child be handed a tiny puzzle they have never seen before, work out which species of puzzle it actually is, run the right method on it, and finish before the minute is up. Schools mostly don’t teach that. They teach maths, English, content. The Selective Test, on the other hand, rewards exactly that one cognitive trick, very heavily, and across thirty questions in a row.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that the puzzle types are not infinite. There are six of them that show up over and over, and once a child knows what those six look like and has a method ready for each, what felt like chaos starts feeling like a checklist. The transition from the first feeling to the second is what proper preparation actually buys you, more than the practice questions themselves.
Key Vocabulary
Deduction. What must be true given the information you have been told. The little word “must” is doing a lot here. The Selective Test is not asking what probably follows from the clues, or what you reckon follows. It is asking what is forced by them. If even one alternative arrangement still fits, the answer you have written down isn’t right yet.
Inference. A conclusion that probably follows. Useful in real life, where probably is most of what we have. Often the wrong answer in this section, because the markers are looking for certainty, not a sensible guess.
Premise. A given fact stated in the question. Premises are the bricks you are allowed to build with. If you find yourself reasoning from something that wasn’t actually said in the stem, that’s an assumption sneaking in, and assumptions are how a question with a single right answer suddenly turns into “B looks fine to me, I think.”
Flaw. A reasoning error inside an argument. When the question asks you to identify the flaw, it is not asking whether you agree with the speaker. It is asking what they did wrong on the way to their conclusion. There is a difference, and the test cares about the difference.
Coded language. Made-up words standing in for English ones. Your job is to crack the code from the worked examples sitting next to the puzzle, including any change in word order between English and the made-up language.
Distractor. A wrong answer engineered to look plausible. Most Selective Test questions sit two or three of these next to the right answer. The marks lost in Thinking Skills are mostly lost to distractors, not to questions a kid couldn’t possibly answer. That detail matters, because it tells you where to put the work.
Concept Explanation
Six question types. They are not equally hard, and they don’t reward the same kind of thinking, and the methods you use on one will lead you straight off a cliff if you try to apply them to another. So before anything else, the student has to know which one they are looking at.
Logical deduction
These are the puzzles with the marbles, the seating arrangements, the three friends who each have a different favourite colour. You get a small set of clues. You work out who sits where, or who likes what, or who came in which order. There is exactly one arrangement that satisfies all the clues, and the answer is one fact about that arrangement. The trick, if you can call something this old a trick, is to take the clues one at a time and write the placements as they fix themselves, rather than trying to hold the whole puzzle in your head and reason from the top. Kids who try the all-at-once approach almost always lose track of which clue they have already used. Kids who write “Lia is in the middle” on the page and then stare at the next clue with that locked in finish well under sixty seconds. We’ve sat there with a stopwatch.
Argument flaws
The type students find most uncomfortable, partly because the questions feel like opinion questions and partly because the Year 6 brain quite naturally wants to express what it thinks. They are not opinion questions. You read a short paragraph, somebody is arguing for something, and you choose the option that correctly identifies what is wrong with their reasoning. Whether the conclusion sounds right doesn’t matter. Whether you would vote for it doesn’t matter. The whole job is locating the move where the argument went sideways, and the move usually has a recognisable shape: a leap from one idea to a slightly different idea; a single personal example treated as if it proved a general claim; the opposing view dismissed without anyone actually engaging with it. Once a child has met those shapes a few times, these become some of the fastest questions on the paper, which is a strange thing to say about something that initially feels uncomfortable.
Patterns and sequences
A row of numbers, letters or shapes, and the question is what comes next. For numbers, the first thing to do, before anything else, is look at the differences between consecutive terms. If the differences are constant, the rule is straightforward addition and you are done. If the differences themselves form a pattern, look at the differences of those differences. Most Selective Test sequences are, despite appearances, simpler than students expect. The mistake we see most often, by a clear margin, is assuming that the rule must be exotic, then losing two minutes hunting for something elegant when the actual rule was something like “double the previous term, then add one.”
Coded language
Looks impossible the first time round and then becomes routine within about three attempts. You get three or four phrases in a made-up language, each translated. A new phrase needs translating, or a known phrase needs encoding. The method is comparison: a made-up word that appears in two phrases corresponds to whatever the two English phrases share. Once you have all the words, check the order. Some of these languages put the noun before the adjective, the opposite of English, and the whole answer can be wrong despite every word having been correctly identified, just because the order was never checked.
Cause and effect
Two true statements, and the question is how they relate. The choices are usually some version of: the first caused the second, the second caused the first, both share a third cause, or they are independent. The reasoning here is mostly about resisting the pull of coincidence. Two true things appearing together feels, to the human brain, like cause and effect. Often it is not. A new wing opens at a hospital. The hospital starts admitting more patients. Both true. Neither caused the other. Both follow from a third thing sitting behind the scene, which is that the hospital expanded its capacity. Children who get into the habit of asking, of every cause-and-effect question, “is there a third thing sitting behind both of these?” do measurably better than children who don’t.
Analogies
The “leaf is to tree as petal is to ___” type. A pair of words with a relationship between them, and the answer is the option whose pair shares the same relationship. The single most useful step, which a lot of kids skip, is to name the relationship in plain English before looking at any of the answer choices. Leaf to tree is a part-to-whole relationship. Now apply that rule to each option. Petal to flower fits. Petal to garden does not. Marks get lost on these because students read the answer choices first, find one that feels related in a vague, general sort of way, and pick it without ever checking the structure underneath.
Reasoning Approach
Whatever question type sits in front of the student, three habits need to fire in the first ten seconds, more or less in this order.
First, the student needs to recognise the question type. The methods differ between types, and applying the wrong method to the right question is, hands down, the single most expensive mistake in Thinking Skills. There is no recovering the lost minute, and there is no partial credit.
Second, they need to work the chosen method through to the end before they second-guess themselves. Switching halfway costs a chunk of time they do not have to spend.
Third, before circling anything, they need to look at the next-best answer and ask themselves why it is wrong. If they cannot articulate why, in a sentence, the chance they have just picked the distractor is uncomfortably high.
Ten seconds of this discipline per question, multiplied across thirty questions, comes to five minutes. Almost every student we see who runs out of time in this section ran out because they did not spend those five minutes upfront. The discipline buys you the time, not the other way around.
Worked Examples
Example 1
Three students sit in a row of three seats. Each plays a different instrument. The students are Lia, Marco, and Nina. The instruments are violin, piano, and flute.
Clues:
- Lia does not sit at either end.
- The piano player sits immediately to Lia’s right.
- Marco does not play the piano.
- The flute player sits at the left end.
Take the clues in order, one at a time.
Lia is not at either end, which puts Lia in the middle. The piano player sits immediately to her right, which puts piano at the right end. Marco does not play piano, so Marco can’t be at the right end, which means Nina is the one sitting at the right end on piano. Marco is therefore at the left end. The flute is at the left end, so Marco plays flute. Lia is left with violin by elimination.
Marco (flute) on the left, Lia (violin) in the middle, Nina (piano) on the right.
The reason this slow, one-clue-at-a-time approach works is that each clue places exactly one piece. Four clues, four placements, and the puzzle locks. If you try to picture all three positions at once, you will almost always end up with at least one clue forgotten by the time you reach the last one. Writing each placement down as it gets fixed keeps the working clean and finishes the puzzle in about a minute.
Example 2
“Some people say schools should ban mobile phones during lessons. But mobile phones are part of modern life and almost every Year 6 student owns one. Banning them is therefore unrealistic and should not be considered.”
Which option best describes the flaw in this argument?
- A. The argument fails to give a personal example.
- B. The argument concludes that something should not be done because it is unrealistic, without explaining why being unrealistic makes it the wrong policy.
- C. The argument relies on a statistic without giving its source.
- D. The argument addresses a topic that is too narrow.
Trace the moves. Phones are common. So banning them is unrealistic. So banning them shouldn’t be considered. That last move is where the argument quietly breaks, because saying something is hard to do is not the same thing as saying it would be wrong to do. Plenty of policies are unrealistic in some sense and worth pursuing anyway. The argument has used “unrealistic” as a shortcut to “should not be done”, which sounds reasonable until you notice they are two different ideas.
The answer is B.
C is the most tempting wrong answer, because the argument really does include a near-statistic without a source. But that is a surface complaint, and the test rewards the deeper structural problem every time. A is a trap for kids who have been taught that personal examples are required for an argument to be valid. They are not.
Example 3
What comes next in this sequence?
2, 5, 11, 23, 47, …
Two ways through this one. Either works, which is the lesson.
The first way is to look at the gaps between consecutive numbers. 3, 6, 12, 24. Each gap is double the one before it. The next gap is therefore 48. 47 plus 48 is 95.
The second way is to notice that each term looks roughly like double the term before. So try the rule “double the previous term, then add one.” 2 doubled is 4, plus 1 is 5. Yes. 5 doubled is 10, plus 1 is 11. Yes. The rule holds across every term. Apply it to 47. Doubled is 94, plus 1 is 95.
Same answer either way. The lesson is that some sequences accept more than one method, and switching when one approach feels slow is faster than persisting with it.
Answer: 95.
Example 4
A made-up language gives these translations.
vorni klep : red book
brina klep : blue book
vorni mata : red apple
Which combination means “blue apple”?
- A. mata brina
- B. klep mata
- C. brina mata
- D. vorni brina
vorni appears in lines 1 and 3, and red appears in both English translations of those lines, so vorni means red. klep appears in lines 1 and 2, with book in both, so klep is book. By elimination, brina is blue and mata is apple.
Now the order. In every given line, the colour comes first and the object follows, which is the same convention as English. So blue apple is brina mata.
Answer: C.
A reverses the order. D pairs two colours together and has no noun at all. Both options are written to look right at a glance. Neither survives the order check.
Quick Concept Check
Check 1
Three friends, Aria, Ben, and Cara, each have a different favourite colour. The colours are red, green, and blue. Aria’s favourite is not red. Ben’s favourite is not blue. The person whose favourite colour is green is not Cara. Who likes which colour?
Check 2
A student writes: “Free time after school is essential, because every student I have asked says they want more of it.”
What is the main flaw in this argument?
Common Mistakes
Treating likely as certain
Shows up most in the deduction questions. A student finds an arrangement that fits the clues, writes it as the answer, and moves on, without ever asking whether other arrangements also fit. The Selective Test wording is “must be true”, which is the entire game. The answer has to follow from the clues with no alternatives possible. If a second arrangement can be built that also satisfies every clue, something has been missed and the question is not finished. The habit to drill, and we drill it explicitly with every Year 6 student we work with, is testing the answer by trying to break it. Try to construct a different arrangement that still fits. If you can, go back.
Voting on the conclusion instead of analysing the reasoning
When the question is about an argument flaw, students read the paragraph, decide whether they personally agree with the speaker, and pick the option that aligns with their view. This is the wrong skill being applied to the question. An argument can have a conclusion you wholeheartedly agree with and still be terribly reasoned. Thinking Skills marks the reasoning, not the opinion. Read these questions ignoring whether you agree, and look for the place where the speaker’s first idea quietly turned into a different idea, where they treated one example as a general rule, where they brushed past the opposing view without engaging.
Reaching for exotic patterns
The pattern questions tempt students into hunting for unusual rules. Squares of primes. Fibonacci. Anything intricate enough to feel sophisticated. Selective Test patterns almost never go that far. Differences first. Then second differences. Then simple multiplication or doubling rules. Working through that short checklist catches the rule for nine sequences out of ten in fifteen seconds or less. Going straight to “is this prime-related?” wastes time on questions that were never going to involve primes in the first place.
Transition to Practice
Now the worksheet. Questions tier up by difficulty and cover all six types. If a tier feels comfortable, the next one will not, which is by design. The point is not to finish everything correctly on the first attempt. The point is to find which of the six types still need drilling, then drill them until the answer arrives faster than the question can be read.
