Why Getting Into A Selective High School Gets Harder Every Year

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As most of you all know, the NSW OC & Selective Test is one of our big focus areas for my team at Bing’s Academy. It’s not the only thing we work on but for many students, it is something we work on. The advantages of getting into a Selective High School is clear. It basically gives you additional marks when doing the HSC, therefore, making it easier to get into a good university. The network you meet around you and the more accelerated content you learn in school are also big bonuses. But with the title of the article, why is it getting harder and harder to get into a Selective high school? Surely the questions will be of the same difficulty you might be thinking. This is true but there is actually another driving force to explain it.

The answer lies in the number of applicants applying every year. Let’s look at the data. In 2019, there were 14,501 applicants. In 2020, there were 15,079 applicants and 4,226 vacancies. Lastly, for the students who have completed it this year in 2021, 15,355 applicants with 4,226 vacancies. This means, in just the last two years, there was an increase of 854 applicants. On average, 400 more students are doing the test every year compared to previous years. This is only insight for the past three years but unfortunately, I could only get accurate numbers from 2019 onwards.

For the last several years, the number of vacancies will remain constant as there are not any new selective high schools being created or introduced. Do I think every year it will increase by 400 a year? Personally no. I think recently especially with the COVID-19 situation, many parents have had to do more homeschooling and pay more attention to their child’s education. Not saying that was not a priority before but it’s a bigger emphasis when parents are working from home more often and are more readily exposed to it. Parents are speaking to other parents who have done the test and if more people know about it, more people will apply to make it even harder and competitive to get into one.

If you are part of the minority and think that 400 extra applicants are not a lot, then let me put this into perspective. A fully selective high school will typically have about 100-120 students. 400 students are equivalent to 3 and a half fully selective high school positions to be taken and occupied out of the 17 that exist today which will dramatically decrease your odds. I wanted to also compare the same thing for the OC test to see whether it is the same thing, unfortunately, data from previous years is not publicly available. However, if we use the data from 2020, we already know that the OC is nearly twice as more difficult in terms of acceptance rate as there are much fewer vacancies available. So there were 12,344 applicants with 1,740 vacancies. Fewer applicants than selective but much fewer spots in general.

What can we do about it?  

So now we know that the NSW Selective Exam is getting harder every year, what can we do about this? I think it depends on the timeframe. If you only have a year or less to the test, you just got to perform your best. If you have multiple years until you do the exam, you may have to take into consideration it is going to be even more competitive so you may have to put in some extra reading time. More time on homework. Your preparation can be fine-tuned accordingly.

In conclusion, there is a clear trend that more people are going for the Selective exam every year making it harder for students to do it compared to students who have done it before.

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