1.1 ICAS Mathematics Format & Papers

Before you solve a single practice question, you should know exactly what ICAS Mathematics looks like on the day. Students who understand the format waste no time being surprised: they know how many questions are coming, how long they have, when a calculator will appear, and which topics can show up. This section gives you that map.

What Is ICAS Mathematics?

ICAS (International Competitions and Assessments for Schools) is a suite of academic assessments run by Janison under the name ICAS Assessments. Janison acquired UNSW Global's Educational Assessments business; ICAS itself was not formerly named UNSW Global. Use the current ICAS Assessments name when checking official information. ICAS Mathematics is the maths subject in the suite.

In Australia, ICAS Mathematics is offered for school students in Years 2 to 12; other countries use different year labels and may not offer every paper. Most students sit it through their school, which registers and supervises the sitting, and the competition runs across multiple countries. It is not a school exam tied to one term's work: it is an independent assessment that deliberately stretches beyond routine classroom exercises, rewarding students who can apply their maths in unfamiliar situations.

The Paper Ladder: Introductory to Paper J

ICAS does not give every student the same paper. Instead, there is a ladder of papers. The table below shows the Australian mapping; candidates elsewhere must use the current official country-to-paper table:

Notice the pattern: younger students get fewer questions and less time; from Year 6 upwards the paper stays at 40 questions in 60 minutes, and the extra challenge comes from harder content rather than more questions.

How difficulty works within a paper

Within any single paper, questions increase in difficulty from start to finish. The early questions check foundational skills that most students at that year level should manage. The middle questions ask you to combine ideas or work through more than one step. The final questions are genuine problems that even strong students find demanding — and they are meant to be. Never panic when the last ten questions feel much harder than the first ten; that is the design, not a sign that you are failing.

Online Format and Question Types

ICAS Mathematics is sat online. Some questions are multiple-choice: you read the question (sometimes with a diagram, table or graph) and choose the correct option from the answers shown. ICAS papers also include written questions. Janison currently describes ICAS assessments as containing multiple-choice and written questions. Current official competition documentation reviewed here does not support promising particular interaction types beyond those two categories, so prepare to solve the mathematics rather than memorise a third-party item-format list.

This has two big consequences for your preparation:

• You do not need to show formal working, but working on scrap paper is still essential — most ICAS errors come from mental slips, not from misunderstood maths.
• On multiple-choice items the answer is already on the screen. If your calculated answer is not one of the options, you have made an error or misread the question. Use the options as a check, and use estimation and elimination (covered in Section 1.3) to narrow them down. On written questions there may be no options to fall back on, so your estimate and your recheck are the only safety net — which is a further reason to build the checking habit now.

The calculator rule

Personal calculators are not allowed. Instead, an on-screen calculator is provided only for the specific questions that need one — typically questions involving awkward decimals, larger numbers or percentages where arithmetic is not the skill being tested. For every other question, you are expected to calculate mentally or with written working. This makes arithmetic fluency a genuine competitive advantage: a student who can quickly compute 15% of 240 or multiply 37 by 6 on paper saves minutes over one who cannot.

The Five Strands

The full ICAS Mathematics framework spans five content strands, but individual papers cover different subsets and depths. Intro, for example, does not assess formal Algebra or Space & Geometry. Use the official framework for your exact paper instead of revising every strand indiscriminately.

The emphasis shifts up the ladder. Paper A (Year 3) asks students to order halves, quarters and eighths, multiply and divide by single digits, describe 2D and 3D shapes and read common graphs. Papers E-F (Years 7-8) expect order of operations, index notation, prime numbers, the Cartesian plane, linear equations and measures such as mean, median, mode and range. Papers I-J (Years 11-12) reach index laws with fractional indices, simple and compound interest, trigonometry in three dimensions, conditional probability, histograms, box plots and scatterplots.

Fees and Entry

Entry is organised per subject, and fees are set by region and by school. Current 2026 Australian entry fees start at AUD 21.95 per subject, but confirm the exact amount and entry route with your school or the official country page because regional pricing varies.

What this means for you

Learn your paper band's numbers — questions and minutes — and rehearse with them. A Year 6 student sitting Paper D has 40 questions in 60 minutes: that is 90 seconds per question on average, with easier early questions banking time for the hard finish. The remaining sections of this guide show you how results are reported and how to build a preparation routine that matches this format.