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. The programme was formerly known as UNSW Global, and many parents and teachers still use that older name, so do not be confused if you hear both. ICAS Mathematics is the maths subject in the suite.

ICAS is designed for school students in Years 2 to 12. 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 matched to year levels:

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, and most questions are multiple-choice: you read the question (sometimes with a diagram, table or graph) and choose the correct option from the answers shown. But ICAS papers are not exclusively multiple-choice. ICAS Assessments describes each paper as being made up of multiple-choice and written questions, and the online platform uses a range of interaction types including free response (you type the answer yourself), drag and drop, gap match and hot spot items. Expect the large majority of your paper to be multiple-choice, but do not be thrown if a question asks you to type or place an answer instead.

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 free-response items there are 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

Every ICAS Mathematics paper samples five content strands. Knowing them helps you revise in a balanced way rather than only practising your favourite topics.

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. As a rough guide, the cost in Australia is around AUD 15-20 per subject, but confirm the exact amount with your school, since it handles registration and passes on the fee that applies in your region.

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.