1.1 What ICAS Science Is & How Papers Are Graded

Before anyone opens a practice question, it helps to know exactly what the ICAS Science competition is - and what it is not. It is not a school test with a pass mark, and it is not a memory quiz. It is an academic competition designed to reward careful scientific thinking, and understanding its shape makes every hour of preparation more effective.

Who Runs ICAS and Who Sits It?

ICAS stands for International Competitions and Assessments for Schools. It is run by Janison, trading as ICAS Assessments - an organisation many parents will remember by its former name, UNSW Global, when it was associated with the University of New South Wales. Most students sit ICAS through participating schools, either online or on paper, depending on what the school chooses. Each year, hundreds of thousands of students in Australia and overseas take part, sitting papers matched to their year level in subjects including Science, English and Mathematics.

Because the school route is the usual one, the first practical question for families is simply whether the school offers ICAS Science and for which year levels. A teacher or the school office can confirm this well before the sitting window. If the answer is no, the child is still not locked out: ICAS also runs official testing centres and authorised partners where parents register directly, covered in Section 1.3.

The Paper Ladder: Introductory to Paper J

ICAS Science is not one exam - it is a ladder of papers, each written for a specific year level so that a Year 4 student is never competing against a Year 9 student. The ladder looks like this:

The pattern is easy to remember: after the Introductory paper, Paper A matches Year 3, and each letter steps up one year. This guide targets Years 3-10 (Papers A-H), the range most families ask about. Content rises steadily up the ladder - the Introductory paper touches light and shadow, materials, life cycles, movement and seasons, while Papers G and H reach topics such as weather hypotheses, random sampling in biology and the effects of electric currents on the human body.

Format: Question Types, Counts and Timing

ICAS Science papers are made up mainly of multiple-choice questions, with technology-enhanced items appearing in the online version - for example drag-and-drop tasks or hot-spot questions where the student clicks a part of a diagram. ICAS publishes the exact length of every Science paper, so there is no guesswork:

Notice the step at Paper C: the paper jumps from 30 questions to 40 and from 45 minutes to 55, so a Year 5 student sits a noticeably bigger paper than a Year 4 student. Note also that the count never rises above 40 - the senior papers get harder, not longer.

Two consequences follow. First, every level works out at roughly 80-90 seconds per question (30 in 45 minutes is 90 seconds; 40 in 55 minutes is about 83), so dawdling on one hard item costs marks elsewhere. Second, because almost every question is answered by selecting or dragging rather than writing paragraphs, even younger students can show strong reasoning without needing polished handwriting or long written explanations.

What "Stimulus-Based" Really Means

The single most important thing to understand about ICAS Science is that its questions are stimulus-based. Each question, or small cluster of questions, is built around a piece of real scientific material called the stimulus - a diagram, a graph, a results table, a map, a photograph or a short passage describing an experiment.

Here is a concrete example of how this feels in the paper. A Year 6 student might see a line graph of a city's average monthly rainfall and temperature, followed by a question asking which month would be best for testing how quickly water evaporates from a shallow dish. The answer is not a memorised fact - it comes from reading the graph, noticing which month is hottest and driest, and reasoning about evaporation. Everything needed is on the page; the skill is extracting it.

This design has a big implication for preparation. A student who has crammed definitions but never practised reading graphs and tables will struggle, while a student with average factual knowledge but strong stimulus-reading habits will do well. That is why this guide spends so much time on the five ICAS skill areas in the next section, and why practice should always involve questions attached to diagrams, data and passages - never bare drill sheets of facts.

The Official Framework: Five Skills x Four Knowledge Areas

ICAS does not publish a fixed syllabus of facts, but it does publish an ICAS Science Assessment Framework - and reading it is the single best way to understand the paper. The framework is a grid. Across the top sit the five skill areas; down the side sit the four knowledge areas, which are the official names ICAS gives its content strands:

Every paper from Introductory to Paper J uses the same grid - five skills multiplied by four knowledge areas - so a question is always "a skill applied to a knowledge area". If you know a question is testing Investigating inside Life & Living, you already know it is probably about fair-test design in a plant or animal experiment. Learn the four official names; using ICAS's own vocabulary makes the published framework readable.

What Topics Appear Up the Ladder?

The framework also lists example questions for each paper, and they show how content matures as students climb the ladder:

• Introductory (Year 2): light and shadow, properties of materials, life cycles, movement of objects, seasons.
• Paper A (Year 3): weather in different regions, living versus non-living things, simple machinery, the processes involved in recycling, the uses of sound.
• Papers B-C (Years 4-5): recycling graphs, food webs, the making and uses of sound, cloud patterns, simple electrical circuits, experimental controls.
• Paper D (Year 6): fossil dating, physical versus chemical changes, resources needed for the survival of living things, the impact of pollution, ranges of radio frequencies.
• Papers E-F (Years 7-8): electrical circuits, forces, chemical processes, the particle model of matter, ecosystem interactions, transformation of energy, contour maps and landforms, renewable versus non-renewable energy, parts of the cell, speed and acceleration calculations.
• Papers G-H (Years 9-10): weather hypotheses, extraterrestrial investigations, scientific writing for experimental reports, random sampling in biology, effects of electric currents on humans.

Notice that every one of those topics sits inside one of the four official knowledge areas - Earth & Beyond, Natural & Processed Materials, Life & Living, or Energy & Change - and that even the senior topics are still examined through the same five skills introduced in the next section.