In our fourth post on ICAS 2025, we look at how to prepare for the Writing paper. ICAS Writing is available for year 4 to year 13 and sitting dates are between 3 and 8 August.
What’s involved in the assessment?
In ICAS Writing, students are given a prompt to write either a narrative or persuasive piece. All students, regardless of year level, have 35 minutes to write and a word limit of 450 words. As the assessment is digital, all students must type their answers. ICAS Writing is run via the locked-down browser (see our previous post on this browser).
Key skills and knowledge
The Writing assessment examines a student’s ability to create a text that follows the conventions of a narrative or persuasive text, using accurate and appropriate grammar and vocabulary.
All year levels are marked against the same criteria, which allows parents and teacher to see a student’s improvement year on year.
The key skills and knowledge tested are:
You can see more information on the Writing paper on the ICAS website here.
Preparation tips
Practice timed writing. Students can sometimes find it difficult to think of ideas and complete writing tasks within a strict timeframe. To make your child’s experience of ICAS Writing more successful, ask them to come up with ideas for different writing topics, and to write down sentences that relate to those ideas. Older students can practice more formal tasks such as creating story beginnings or opinion pieces. The quicker a student can pick a topic to write about, the more time they will have to focus on the actual writing.
Practice typing. As a digital assessment, ICAS Writing relies on a student’s ability to type their writing within the time limit. Your child will be able to focus more on their writing if they can type reasonably accurately and quickly. We recommend using a website such as TypingClub to help assess your child’s typing skills and work on improving them.
Practice recognising genre or text types. To successfully create a text that follows genre conventions, a student needs to understand those conventions. If your child understands the difference between a story and a report, they will be able to write a better story or report when required. Find examples of the texts students may need to write, and ask your child to identify them. Below are some potential writing tasks from the ICAS Writing assessment framework:
Persuasive
- a review
- an advertisement
- a letter
- a formal argument
- an opinion piece
Narrative
- the beginning of a narrative
- the complication or climax of a narrative
- a description of a setting
- a description of a character
- the end of a narrative
General ICAS preparation. See our ICAS Prep: Tips and Tricks blog post for preparations including getting familiar with the testing environment.
ICAS Writing at Focus Education
If your child is sitting ICAS Writing at Focus Education, you must make sure their device has the latest version of Janison Replay, the locked down browser, installed prior to the test. This browser ensures that students cannot access spelling, grammar, or other resources to assist their writing. Please see our post on the locked-down browser here, and ICAS information here.
Look for our next post, ICAS Prep: English!
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