Victoria's Selective Entry High Schools: A Parent's Guide

The four schools

Victoria has four selective entry high schools. All are government schools, and all draw students from across the state rather than from a residential zone — places are decided by the entrance exam, not by where you live.

• Melbourne High SchoolSouth Yarra — boys.
• The Mac.Robertson Girls' High SchoolMelbourne — girls.
• Nossal High SchoolBerwick — co-educational.
• Suzanne Cory High SchoolWerribee — co-educational.

Who sits the exam, and when

Students sit the exam in Year 8 — their second year of secondary schooling — competing for a place starting in Year 9. ACER administers the centralised exam and selection process on behalf of the Department of Education.

The exam is typically held on a Saturday in June, with applications opening and closing earlier in the year, and results released through the application portal around August. Exact dates change every cycle, so confirm the current year's timetable on ACER's official Victorian Selective Entry High Schools site before planning around them.

What's on the exam

The exam takes roughly four hours to administer including registration and breaks, with 2 hours and 35 minutes of actual exam tasks across three assessed components:

• Mathematics and Quantitative Reasoning — 60 minutesMathematical knowledge and reasoning applied to real-world contexts, plus the ability to think and reason using numbers, patterns and shapes.
• Reading and Verbal Reasoning — 55 minutesAccessing and retrieving information, then integrating, interpreting, reflecting on and evaluating ideas — alongside reasoning with words, concepts and logic.
• Writing — 40 minutesTwo tasks, assessing the ability to convey ideas in precise language with ideas organised coherently.

How the places are allocated

Offers are made across three categories, and understanding the split matters — the overwhelming majority of places come down to exam rank alone.

• Standard merit — 85% of placesOffered purely on rank from exam performance.
• Equity consideration — up to 10%Based on exam performance plus meeting equity conditions, such as a parent holding a health care card, or the student being Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
• Principal discretion — up to 5%Principals may also weigh academic results, recent school reports, co-curricular and extra-curricular achievements, and demonstrated motivation.

How competitive is it?

Around 1,000 Year 9 places are available each year across the four schools, and the exam is explicitly designed to identify high-achieving candidates — meaning it has to separate strong students from other strong students.

The practical implication for preparation: the questions your child finds easy aren't the ones that decide the outcome. Consistent practice on unfamiliar, multi-step problems under time pressure is what moves a rank.

How to prepare

Because content doesn't exceed Year 8 curriculum level, preparation is less about learning ahead and more about exposure — to the question styles, the pacing, and the experience of sitting a long exam without losing accuracy in the final section.

Mocky generates fresh ACER Selective Entry practice tests matched to the real exam's structure, so your child can rehearse each component under realistic time limits and get instant scoring with worked explanations.