Selective High School test — Year 6 child at 65th percentile, realistic chances?
We've been prepping my daughter for the Selective High School Placement Test for about 16 weeks. She's currently scoring around the 65th percentile on practice papers, with reading being her strongest area and mathematical reasoning her weakest. The schools we're hoping for are top-tier — places like James Ruse or North Sydney Girls — and I know those require scores closer to the 99th percentile. At what point do we have an honest conversation about realistic expectations?
She does 45 minutes of targeted practice six days a week with one rest day. Her mathematical reasoning has improved from about the 48th to the 60th percentile over the prep period, which is encouraging but slow. Thinking skills has been stable around the 68th. I genuinely don't know if the remaining 8 weeks can close a 30–35 percentile gap, or if we should start identifying second and third preference schools that might actually be in reach.
Her primary school has a strong academic environment and she's generally a good student — mostly A grades — but the top selective schools draw from a pool where nearly every applicant is also a strong student. We don't want to discourage her but we also don't want to set expectations that lead to real disappointment in August.
Did continued practice actually move the needle in the final 8 weeks for anyone, or was the trajectory established by week 10 or so pretty much where it stayed?
James Ruse cut-offs are genuinely around the 99th percentile — I've heard from parents whose kids scored 97th and still didn't get an offer. There are plenty of good selective schools in the 80th–90th range where a move from 65th to 75th would be very competitive.
We had a similar situation two years ago. Our son plateaued around 70th percentile and we adjusted our preference list. He got into his third preference and it's been a genuinely great fit academically and socially — it wasn't the heartbreak we feared.
Keep the six-days-a-week pace but shift the last 4 weeks entirely to past papers under strict timed conditions. That's where kids pick up the most ground — not through new content, but through speed and confidence under pressure.
The 30–35 percentile gap is a hard one to close in 8 weeks for the very top schools. Most kids' percentiles stabilize within about 5–8 points of where they are at the halfway point of prep — that's not a hard ceiling but it's the typical pattern.
We were in almost the exact same position two years ago — my son was hovering around the 60th-65th percentile at the 16-week mark and we genuinely thought he'd make it. He didn't. What we didn't realise until after the results came back was that mathematical reasoning wasn't just "weak" — it was tanking his composite score way harder than we expected, because the selective test weights quantitative sections heavily relative to how most kids practise for them. We'd been letting him coast on his reading strength and calling it balanced prep. It wasn't.
Second attempt, we flipped the ratio completely. He did maths reasoning drills five days a week and reading only twice, and we got obsessive about timed conditions — not just completing papers but finishing them with two minutes to spare. The time pressure on the actual exam is brutal and kids who haven't practiced under it freeze in ways they never do at home. His percentile in mathematical reasoning went from the low 60s to the low 80s over about 12 weeks of targeted work. That was the difference.
For your daughter specifically — 65th overall with reading as her ceiling is a warning sign, not a comfort. The top-tier schools are pulling from the 95th+ percentile pool, so she needs another area to carry weight, and it has to be maths reasoning because that's where the most ground can be gained quickly with the right drills. Don't let the strong reading score make you feel like you're further along than you are. Be honest about the gap and treat the next few weeks like you're building a completely different skill, not just refining an existing one.