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Free ICAS practice tests: Papers A to F

ICAS is a competition-style assessment sat through schools, one paper per subject per year level. Papers are lettered rather than numbered: in Australia, Paper A is Year 3, B is Year 4, C is Year 5, D is Year 6, E is Year 7 and F is Year 8.

Entry is through your child's school, an ICAS testing centre or an ICAS partner. We're practice — we don't enter students or run sittings.

Every paper's structure in one table: the ICAS paper reference.

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Last updated: 17 October 2026

What we offer

Mathematics, Papers A to F. 40 questions per paper. Papers A, B and C are mostly multiple choice; from Paper D up, the last five questions switch to integer answers you have to produce rather than choose — and those five are consistently the hardest questions on the paper. Paper F has an on-screen calculator throughout.

English, Papers A to F. Reading passages with a set of questions on each, plus vocabulary and language questions that stand on their own — about three quarters reading, the same balance as the real paper, at the same length and in the same time.

Spelling, Papers A to E. The real paper asks for spelling in four ways: dictated words, rules and conventions, proofreading, and correcting. In the real test the dictated words are heard through headphones. Our papers start with dictated words, so have headphones ready.

Science, Papers A to F. Four-option questions across the capability areas the real paper is built on: observing and measuring, interpreting data, predicting and concluding, reasoning and problem solving, and investigating. Every Science paper has an on-screen calculator throughout.

ICAS names its papers by letter, not by year — a Year 5 student sits Paper C. Find the year, then the subject: open a year below and pick a subject to go to that paper's own page.

Which papers your child can sit shows in their account.

Each paper's page covers what is on it, where marks are usually lost, and what actually helps — written for that paper, not for ICAS in general.

What makes ICAS different from NAPLAN

NAPLAN asks whether a student has the year's content. ICAS asks how far past it they can go: the paper starts at about year level and climbs well beyond it, so a strong student is still being stretched at the end of the paper. Marks are not expected to be high, and shouldn't be read like a school test.

Our ICAS-style questions are calibrated against real ICAS papers rather than guessed at from year level, which is why the top of a paper is genuinely hard. We don't reproduce the papers themselves.

What each subject actually tests

Mathematics rewards reading the question properly more than it rewards arithmetic. A large share of the paper is worded problems where the hard part is deciding what is being asked; the calculation that follows is usually ordinary. From Paper D up, the last five questions want a number typed in rather than chosen, which removes the option of working backwards from the choices — a tactic that carries students a long way through the earlier parts.

English is roughly three quarters reading passages. The questions that separate students are not the ones asking what happened; they are the ones asking why the writer chose a word, what a phrase implies, or how two texts differ in stance. Vocabulary items test words in context, not definitions.

Spelling asks for more than producing words from memory: proofreading and correcting questions start from a word that is already wrong. Recognising that a word is wrong is a different skill from producing it correctly, and only the second one gets practised at school.

Science is not a recall test. The capability areas — observing and measuring, interpreting data, predicting and concluding, reasoning and problem solving, investigating — mean most questions hand you an experiment or a table and ask what follows from it. A student who has memorised the syllabus but never had to read a results table finds this harder than expected.

What a good ICAS score looks like

Lower than parents expect. ICAS is designed so that the top of each paper stretches students well past their year level, so a raw mark that would be disappointing on a school test can be a strong ICAS result. Read the distribution, not the percentage.

This also changes how to practise: grinding for a perfect score is the wrong target. The useful work is getting comfortable being stuck — reading a hard question twice, making a start, and moving on rather than freezing.

Sample questions

Try each one first, then open the answer and worked solution under it.

ICAS Mathematics Paper C

1. A garden bed is a regular hexagon with sides of 1.2 m. What is its perimeter?

Question 1 — choose one answer
Answer and worked solution

Correct answer: C

Perimeter is the distance all the way round the edge.

A hexagon has 6 sides, and regular means every side is the same length, so all six are 1.2 m.

6 × 1.2 = 7.2 m.

The perimeter of the garden bed is 7.2 m.

ICAS English Paper C

2. Coach said Ben was 'running around like a headless chook'. What did she mean?

Question 2 — choose one answer
Answer and worked solution

Correct answer: D

'Like a headless chook' is an Australian idiom — a fixed saying with a non-literal meaning.

It paints someone dashing around in a busy, disorganised panic.

The words are an image, not a report: no actual chook is involved.

Ben was rushing about in a disorganised way.

ICAS Science Paper C

3. A measuring cylinder is marked every 2 mL and a balance reads in whole grams. A student measures 60 mL of cooking oil in the cylinder and finds its mass to be 55 g. Density is mass divided by volume, and the division gives 0.91666 and so on. How should the density be reported?

Question 3 — choose one answer
Answer and worked solution

Correct answer: A

How many figures a result may carry is set by the instruments, not by how many the division happens to produce.

A cylinder marked every 2 mL and a balance reading whole grams each give about two trustworthy figures, so the density may carry about two as well.

That makes 0.92 g/mL the right report: 0.9167 claims a precision neither instrument has, while cutting further throws away a figure the instruments did earn.

Report 0.92 g/mL, which is as far as the two instruments reach.

Which paper should my child practise?

The one matching their year level. Practising a level up is only useful for a student already comfortable at the top of their own paper — and it's usually more productive to work on speed and accuracy at level than to grind a harder paper.

Practise free, no account needed. Every paper is marked the moment your child finishes, with a worked solution on every question.

Free practice draws from a limited set of questions, so some will repeat. Subscribers get the full question bank and fewer repeats.

Start free ICAS-style practiceAMC practice →

Guides

ICAS results explained: awards, percentiles and what to do next covers what each certificate means, how the percentile works and when certificates reach schools.

ICAS vs NAPLAN: how the two tests differ covers who sits each test, when it runs, how entry works and how the results compare.

Meritly is an independent Australian service and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the organisations that write or run the tests we cover.