AAS Scholarship Practice Tests: What's in the Exam

AAS stands for Academic Assessment Services— one of several organisations that run scholarship entrance testing for Australian independent schools. In Melbourne, it’s the board used by Melbourne Grammar, among others. If your child has been told they’re sitting “the AAS test,” here’s what that actually means.

What’s actually in the AAS Scholarship Test

The AAS Scholarship Test is built around four components:

A detail worth knowing before test day: AAS multiple-choice questions can have up to five answer options, and unlike some other boards, “none of the above” can be a genuinely correct answer — not just a distractor. That changes how you should teach elimination strategy: you can’t always assume one of the visible options must be right.

A caveat, honestly: exact section lengths and question counts can vary between administrations and aren’t something we’ve independently verified against a locked, current paper. Treat the table above as the shape of the test, not exact timing — confirm specifics with the school or with AAS directly before test day.

A different kind of reasoning section

The AAS Reasoning component is genuinely different from what other boards test — it includes an Abstract Reasoningelement (working with shapes, patterns and transformations rather than words or numbers), alongside verbal and numerical reasoning. This is the one section that has no real equivalent on the ACER Scholarship Test at all. We’ve written a full breakdown of both halves — see the Abstract Reasoning guide for the shapes-and-patterns half, and the Verbal Reasoning guide for the words half — which turns out to be the bigger of the two.

Free practice for this board

Mathematics, General Reasoning and Reading Comprehension are live and free to sit today — built and checked against real exam-style material, section by section, the same bar every board on this site is held to. Written Expression is the one AAS section we haven’t built yet, since a timed writing task is a different kind of product to a multiple-choice one. This page will get an update the moment that changes, not a quiet edit.

If your child is also being considered for a school using ACER or Edutest, both of those have real, live sample questions today too — see the ACER format guide or the Edutest format guide.

What’s next

If you’re not yet sure which board applies to your child’s target school, start with which test your school actually uses.

Ready to sit one? AAS scholarship test practice has the paper section by section, the schools that test with Academic Assessment Services, and the free papers to start on.