ICAS Results Explained: What Each Award Means

ICAS results come as an award on a certificate and a report online. Every award is about where your child’s score sits among the other children who sat the same subject in the same year. There is no pass mark. This guide explains each award, how to find the results, and how to read them.

The ICAS awards

Awards are set separately for each subject and each year level, and Australia and New Zealand are ranked separately.

A medal goes to the top scorer in a subject and year in each region, such as an Australian state or New Zealand.

Two things follow. First, a Credit or better puts your child in the top 36% of the children who sat the paper, and those children often chose to sit it. Second, because awards depend on the whole group, the mark needed for each one can change from year to year.

How to find the results

1. Get the TAP-ID and PIN. If you paid through ICAS’s parent payment system, ICAS emails them to you after you pay and again when results are out. They are also printed on any past ICAS certificate. If you cannot find them, ICAS has a request form on its website.
2. Log in to the results portal on the ICAS website.
3. Check the timing. Results appear about 10 to 15 business days after the last sitting day for each subject. Writing takes about 4 to 6 weeks, because people mark it by hand.

The printed certificate usually comes later, through the school.

How to read the report

• The score. Most ICAS papers give one mark for each correct answer, added up into a score.
• The percentile. A percentile of 75 means your child scored higher than 75% of the children who sat that subject in their year.
• The skill areas. The report compares your child with students across the country in each area the paper tests.
• Question by question. You can see which questions your child got right, and how other students did on each one.

The question list is the most useful part. Look for a group of missed questions on one skill, rather than at the award on its own.

Keeping it in proportion

ICAS is a competition that a school offers, not a test every child sits. The papers include questions above the year level on purpose, so that the top 1% can be told apart. A child who finds the paper hard is meeting it as it was designed. ICAS describes itself as low-stakes, and says only some highly selective schools look at the results.

What to do next

1. Celebrate the effort. Sitting a paper written to stretch the top 1% is worth a mention, whatever the award.
2. Pick one skill from the question list. One clear goal helps more than going back over the whole paper.
3. Practise in the format. ICAS uses paper letters, not year numbers, and a fixed time. Knowing the layout before the day frees your child to think about the questions.

Practise for the next ICAS

Our ICAS-style Mathematics, English and Science papers cover Papers Intro to H (Years 2 to 10), timed, with worked explanations after each paper is marked.

To be clear about what these are: papers we wrote in the ICAS style, not ICAS papers. We do not reproduce ICAS past papers, our scores do not predict an ICAS award, and nothing here is endorsed by ICAS. A free account includes 3 practice tests.

Start at the ICAS practice page, or the New Zealand page if your child is at school in New Zealand. Not sure which paper letter your child sits? See ICAS Paper C, D and E: year levels and free practice.