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What is OAS?
Online Assessment System provides tests to students. The tests are compiled carefully from many sources. The difficulty levels are suitable for kids from English speaking countries. There is a strong Australian and US flavour in the content. But it's expected to be of common standards to English speaking countries.
The system provides monthly tests to the kids. Doing well in these monthly tests often means that they are competent. Apart from their raw mark, they will be ranked against other members in the same grade.
The author of this system collected the questions to help his own kid. Having seen the success, he would like to make the system available to other kids rather than wasted. This means there is a lot of extra work and web programming, but he hoped it was worth the effort. What subjects are covered?
Currently the only subjects covered are mathematics, computer skills and science. There may be more covered in the future depending on if we can find some volunteers to expand the question database.
Is access to the system free?
Yes, currently access to the tests on the system is free. However, free accounts only get access to a limited number of tests. The purpose of the free tests is to help parents know their kids' general performance across different areas.
Access to to OC and SS groups
There are two special groups of users called OC and SS. These groups of users have access to sets of tests and questions collected to help students prepare for the NSW OC test (grade 4) and the Selective School test (grade 6). They are particularly useful to students who do not go to a coaching college. They need a good set of tests to practice questions at difficulty levels suitable for these competitive tests. These two groups are supported by an online tutor who provides help, feedbacks and advices throughout the period of 12 months prior to the tests. A lot more detail is provided in separate documents for each group. This is premium access to the system available through a monthly membership fee. Parents can trial, join and exit (then rejoin) on monthly basis. The OC group membership covers period 1st Jul to middle of Jul the year after. The SS group membership covers the period 1st Jan to middle of Mar the year after.
OC and Selective School trials
Every year, around 3 months before the OC and the Selective school test (in NSW), Mathemafix offers some free tests. These trial tests are intended to help students/parents know how the kids' chances of getting an offer. Often the average of 6 trial sets will help predicting a student's chances.
What years are covered?
The question database currently only cover primary school years from 1-7.
Notes about registration
It's expected that parents will register for their kids to use. This is especially true of very young kids.
After registration, the system will send a verification email. You will need to verify your email by clicking on the link in the email. After this you can log on and start doing the tests. This is why you
must provide a valid email address. If the login name you like is used, you will need to use a different. You may need to try a few times once the system has a lot of members.
You should register only one account per student. Register more than 1 account at the same grade to retry tests is a violation of the terms and conditions of this system. These extra accounts will be detected and promptly disabled and repeat violations will lead to banning access to all accounts. At the beginning of each year you can move up 1 grade. If you want to skip grade, contact us using the contact form.
The P.I.N is personal Identification Number. If you provide it, you will be able to use it to recover your account and password. If you fail to login, you get a chance to recover your accounts. After registration, you will receive an email with your account information and a link for activation of the account. Notes about doing a test
The monthly tests are created for each grade. You cannot access tests that are not opened for the current month. It's expected that kids between grade 1 and 2 would need to have a parent sitting
next to guide the kid on how to use the web forms for the first couple of times. Do not help the child in any way other than how to use the web browser. Helping a child to answer questions will distort
the ranking on the system and provide a false level of performance. Before attempting a test, the kid must have about 1 hour to spend continuously on the test. If the kid
abandoned the test while doing it, all results are lost. If the kid ended the attempt early, only the attempted questions will be recorded, and the others will have no marks (lowering the overall result)
Facing a hard question, the kid can skip it. It will be added to the end of the queue. Only after all questions are answered, the system will mark the test. The time allowed for the test is shown. If
the kid runs out of time, the test will be submitted automatically and marked by the system. Unattempted questions will get zero score.
Many people wonder why this system does not allow students to go back and change an answer before submitting the test. This system is designed to
train students in the best test taking technique. This technique is well-known but often ignored by students. They should work slowly and steadily
from the first question to the last. They should skip questions that appear too hard and come back later. As most tests have time limits, students
must learn to work at the right speed and should not even think about coming back to fix up a question. This is particularly true for tough competitive
tests. There is hardly enough time to just complete the test, let alone thinking about going back to fix problems. The objective is to help students to
develop the test taking skills that include the ability to evaluate a question and decide to do it or to skip. This rapid evaluation ability is vital
for high performance in competitive tests. Without it, students will get stuck in some questions and run out of time.
The OC maths and GA trial tests are very hard tests for grade 4 students. The tests provided on this site are of very high quality and had been proven to be very effective. They should NOT be treated as extra learning materials. They must be treated very seriously like real tests.
Parents should make sure kids understand the following things to avoid poor results in these trials and in the coming real test.
Treat each trial test seriously. Don't try to do all of them quickly. Do 1 only, think about the questions you fail to answer, wait for the answers to be available in the next 48 hours and rethink about the questions again before moving on to the next test.
Only do the test when the mind is fresh. This is high pressured testing, every second counts!
Try to spend up to 10 seconds to assess the difficulty of a question. If it looks too unfamiliar or difficult, skip it. This is time management that kids must learn to have enough time to complete all questions. If 60 seconds have been spent and the solution is no way near, skip and move on! Spending more time on a difficult question will cause time to run out for other questions.
Don't do GA questions too quickly even if you have a lot of time. Many questions are very tricky and what is obvious is also often wrong!
Following these advices will help to increase the marks slowly across tests 1-6. There must be time between tests for the kids to think. That's why the first test was opened about 90 days before the real test date.
Notes about results
The result comes back immediately after a kid finishes a test or runs out of time. The kid will be offered a chance to view the answer to questions s/he got wrong. The result is stored and kept for future viewing. It's recommended that the kids should review these questions in 1-2 weeks. If there are too many kids making mistakes, the author may reword the questions to make them clearer or to add a hint to help the kids to understand.
Are the questions related to Australian OC or selective school tests?
No. The questions are not related specifically to OC, selective schools or any scholarship tests. However they are of general ability meaning that if kids do well on these tests, they will definitely do well on any tests at similar level. For example, the end of year test for year 4 will compare favourably with the Australian NSW OC test in same subject area. Similarly the year 5 and 6 tests will be just as tough as the NSW selective school tests. There will be easy and hard questions in each test. The hard questions are generally requiring kids to be very smart and perhaps at one
grade higher to solve them in limited amount of time given to each test. It is normal for a seemingly competent student in a normal class to score between 50%-60%. Only the best of the best would look to 95% or better at the final test for the year.
To help kids get an idea how they would perform in OC, Selective school test or a scholarship test, tough trial tests will be offered each year near the time these tests take place. These tests are just as tough as the real ones.
The question database is regularly updated with interesting questions to reflect what is happening
out there. If you have interesting questions, please send them in to be included into the database so that everyone can share them. If you have a kid that is getting tutoring or coaching service, by doing these tests you can have a
feel for the ability of the kid and what being taught by tutors. If they do well in tests provided by your tutors but poorly in our tests, they must have learnt mainly by memory rather than by true understanding. Your privacy
All the information you supplied will be kept private. Please do not provide false information as it
would be much harder to help you later when you have problems. The system has been designed to fight spammers using graphics verification code. We fight spammers and will respect your privacy.
What help can you expect to get?
Not much! We don't have resources to help you very much. However we will try to help solving your access problems and fix system problems. If you notice a bad question, let us know by the contact
form so that we can fix it up for everyone to benefit. There are several thousand questions in the database, it's impossible to be sure that they are all correct. In fact we did make a few mistakes in
data entry and will fix them as soon as we spot the errors. If you can help by providing interesting questions, that would be much appreciated.
How to recover your account login and password?
Just try to login. If you fail, you will get a chance to recover your account and password if you know your email or login.
Account status and de-activation
When a new account is created, the status is "new". It has to be activated before the user could log on. This is done via a link sent to the user's email. This is why a correct email address must be supplied. Later the user can deactivate the account. Why would you want to do this? If you want to stop receiving email communications but still want to have the account just in case later you want to re-use it, you can then use contact form to send in a request to reactivate. To completely remove your account, send email in using the contact form mentioning your account login id.
Accounts that are not activated and those activated but never been used will be automatically removed from the system 30 days after registration.
Parent account and sharing results
There is a feature called parent account. This account can see the test results of the child accounts. When a parent creates an adult account. It is just another account but the type is different. The other accounts can register the login of the parents into their individual profiles to connect to the parent accounts. From this point on the parent account can see all the test results of the child accounts. This registration is done by opening up a child account and updating its profile with the login of the parent account. This means one account allows another account to see its test results. This is very convenient for a parent without having to log on individual accounts for the kids. A tutor of a group of students can use this feature to observe all the students' test results.
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