How Meritly works
Every paper follows the same three steps — choosing it, sitting it against the clock, and going through it together.
1.Choose what to practise
NAPLAN, ICAS and AMC-style papers; OC and Selective sections.
2.They sit it against the clock
Full-length, with the real time limit.
3.Go through it together
Marked the moment they finish, with worked solutions.
You choose what to practise
Free practice needs no account: you pick the exam or subject and the year level, then hand the device to your child. With a subscription, you set your child's year level once. After that it's two taps: a subject for everyday practice — Maths, English, Science or Reasoning — or a full-length paper: NAPLAN, ICAS, the AMC, and the OC and Selective sections. You can also assign a paper yourself from the parent dashboard.
Free practice, and what a subscription adds
Free practice needs no account. You choose an exam or a subject and a year level, then hand the device to your child. When they finish, they hand it back, and you see the paper marked, with a worked solution on every question. Free practice draws from a limited set of questions, so some will repeat, and nothing is saved for next time.
A subscription opens the full question bank, with fewer repeats. Questions your child got wrong come back for another try, every paper is kept for you to read back, and there are no ads on the student and parent pages.
Reasoning: the one nobody teaches as a subject
Every subject asks a child to reason, and none of them teaches reasoning itself. That is what this one is — Years 3 to 6, where it starts to separate results.
Four kinds of question:
- Logical and critical reasoning — what follows from what, what a claim is actually resting on, which of two speakers has the better case, and what would weaken it
- Constraint puzzles — five children, five seats, four clues: work out who sits where
- Spatial reasoning — what a folded net becomes, how shapes tile together, what a stack of blocks looks like from the side
- Quantitative reasoning — reading a table or a chart to decide something rather than to restate it
None of it needs content your child hasn't met yet. The difficulty is entirely in the thinking — which is why it carries: a child who can hold four constraints in their head reads a maths word problem differently too.
The paper is built, not pulled off a shelf
Every paper is assembled when your child starts it. For exam practice it's built to the real test's specification — the official question count, the official time limit, the official spread of difficulty. If we can't build one properly, we don't offer it that day: no padded papers, no "close enough".
They sit it like the real thing
On screen and on the clock. Everyday Maths, English and Science practice goes beyond multiple choice and typed answers: your child also picks more than one answer, puts items in order, matches pairs and ticks boxes in a table — some of the on-screen question types NAPLAN online uses. Maths and English also have drop-down lists, and English has questions where your child clicks a word. Dictated spelling questions play a recording, so keep headphones nearby. With a subscription, answers save as they go, so a paper can be paused and picked up later without losing anything.
It's marked the moment they finish
By rule, instantly — whether your child picked an option, typed an answer, chose from a drop-down list, clicked a word, put items in order, matched pairs or ticked boxes in a table. Every question comes with a worked solution, so the conversation afterwards is "let's see why" rather than "you got 24". Nothing is sent to an AI to be graded.
What you see as a parent, with a subscription
- Every question, and what your child chose
- A working level estimate, and the topics they're weakest on
- How long each paper took, and whether they ran over time
- A history you can read back, question by question, whenever you like
It follows your child
With a subscription, practice gets harder when your child is cruising and easier when they're struggling, within sensible limits. We won't drop a child years back, and we won't throw them at content they haven't been taught. If you'd rather they stayed at year level, you can lock it from the dashboard.
How we set difficulty
Difficulty is calibrated against real exam papers rather than guessed at from year levels, and reviewed as students answer. We don't reproduce past papers.
One thing we leave to a human
Wherever writing is tested — NAPLAN, ICAS, the selective test — it is marked by a person against a criteria rubric, and two markers can weigh the same piece differently. We don't mark writing automatically, and we won't use AI to imitate that judgement: a number from us would look like a result without meaning like one.
Practise free, no account needed. Every paper is marked the moment your child finishes, with a worked solution on every question.