Parents of high school students who want to get into a Selective School have a lot of information to take in to help their child prepare for the very competitive Selective placement test.

As you look for information on the Internet, you’ll probably find a lot of articles and blogs with tips on how to help your child get ready for the placement test. Teachers, tutors, and even other parents share what they know from their own experiences. This makes it easy for you to get the information you need by just clicking a button.

So, this blog gives you a change of pace.

In this blog, we talk about how NOT to prepare your child for the Selective placement test. There are some bad ways to help your child prepare for a test, whether you hire a Year 5 English tutor or do it yourself.

Read on to find out what other people won’t tell you.

How not to get ready

The Selective placement test is getting harder and less predictable every year. Many smart students don’t do well not only because they don’t study enough, but also because they study the wrong things.

We don’t want your child to go through that. Here are a few things to watch out for so you don’t get ready wrong:

Some tutoring centres force parents to teach by giving students too much homework that they can’t do on their own. This can be counterproductive if parents who don’t have much time hire another home tutor to help their child with the homework given by the tutoring centre. This is not a good way to prepare for the Selective Service test, and it can also cost you as a parent.

It’s not enough to just take mock tests to do well on the real test. This can make people learn by rote rather than think creatively and critically. For students to do well on the Selective placement tests, they need to learn how to think for themselves and answer questions that can be hard to predict.

Using old and boring activities to teach the material on the Selective placement test. Students might get bored and stop paying attention if this is done. Instead, they should love, be inspired by, and enjoy learning and getting ready for the test.

What you need to do to get ready

So, how do you get ready for the Selective placement test, which can be hard to predict? Here are some ideas:

  • Give your child the tools they need to answer questions they’ve never seen before.
  • Give your child the tools to think well so that they can do well no matter how strange the task.
  • Sign your child up for tutoring that teaches them how to think and do better on tests, even if they don’t know anything about them.
  • In addition to what was said before, the homework they are given should be related to what they are learning at the tutoring centre (i.e. revision, which can be done independently).
  • Don’t waste your money and time on tutoring that doesn’t help. This will only set your child up to be upset if they don’t get a spot in the Selective programme.

What tutoring does work?

At Masterclass English College, we help students reach their educational goals, such as getting into a selective high school.

The topics on the Selective Placement test are the focus of our Selective Preparation Program. The courses are taught by qualified high school teachers who know how to help a student move from the primary level to the selective level and high school level. The course is about:

English gives students a chance to read all kinds of texts. It has all the levels and types of Reading Comprehension questions needed for the selective test. Students also learn grammar and punctuation in a structured way and add to their vocabulary.

Writing: Students learn all the types of writing that could be on the test, such as writing an advice sheet, a story, an argument, a discussion, and a news report. Students see the marking rubric and how their writing is graded, which helps them learn how to get better. They also learn how to break down and analyse a question and a prompt. This helps them write with confidence and get right to the point, which helps them get good grades.

We teach the two most important parts of thinking skills: how to solve problems and how to think critically. Problem-solving involves putting mathematical or logical problems into a real-world setting. Critical thinking includes both inductive reasoning (based on common sense and general knowledge) and deductive reasoning (solved and taught using mathematical type analysis).

Students also learn how to use their thinking skills in an exam setting and how to use tools to reduce the amount of mental work they have to do. Through the course, students learn how to take exams and manage their time. They also learn test-specific skills that help them answer questions faster and give them more time to think about their answers.