How Selective Writing is marked
The writing test is one of four equally weighted parts of the result, each worth 25% (NSW Department of Education). It is marked against two sets of criteria. Each response is marked by two different examiners (NSW Department of Education).
The split comes from the official Selective Writing marking criteria. Set A is 15 of the 25 marks, and it is the set that needs room on the page.
Why a short response struggles
To score well against those criteria, a response has to show all of these at once: developed ideas, logical organisation, varied sentences, suitable vocabulary, and accurate spelling and punctuation. That takes space. A fifty-word response gives a marker too little to work with, even if every word is correct.
It helps to think of it as a checklist a marker runs through while reading:
- Did the student address the actual task?
- Did they follow the correct format?
- Are the ideas engaging and developed?
- Is the structure clear?
- Is the vocabulary precise?
- Are the sentences varied?
- Is the grammar mostly accurate?
Quality matters more than length. But quality needs room on the page to show.
How much students wrote in our trial tests
The length that works also varies by text type. We measured this. About 250 students wrote weekly timed tasks in our Selective Horizon trial tests from February to April 2026. Two qualified educators marked every piece separately. The mark is the average of their two scores.
| Text type | Average length |
|---|---|
| Newspaper article | About 367 words |
| About 403 words |
Newspaper article and email were two of several text types students wrote across the ten weeks. Averaged across all of them, the overall length sat in the mid-300s. These numbers are from the students in Selective Horizon 2026, and are likely to shift as the program runs again in future years.
250 students is a small sample. For comparison, 16,487 students sat the Selective High School Placement Test in 2024. That is the most recent count the NSW Department of Education has published. One pattern stood out. Every student in roughly the top 10% of our group wrote more than that overall average. None of them wrote short pieces.
Worth knowing
The extra words aren't padding. A student who is developing their ideas tends to need more room. The length comes from that depth. It is not something they aim for.
How to spend the 30 minutes
Many strong students lose time the same way. They spend too long on a fancy opening paragraph, sometimes seven or eight minutes of the thirty on that one paragraph. Then the middle is rushed, and the ending is two quick sentences because time has run out. To a marker, the piece looks unbalanced: a strong opening, thin ideas in the middle, and an ending that does not follow from what came before.
There is no official rule behind that split. It is the split we teach, because it keeps the middle of the piece, where most of the marks are, from being rushed.
Aim for depth, not a word count
"Don't chase a word count. Chase a developed idea, a clear structure, and language that's varied and accurate. The length mostly takes care of itself."
Writing more should never come at the expense of clarity or accuracy. A long response full of spelling mistakes, run-on sentences, or ideas that drift from the prompt won't score well either. Length on its own has never been the goal.
If you want a number, it is this. A response of a few hundred words, properly developed and not padded, is usually what shows the range the marking criteria ask for. In our Selective Horizon trial tests, the overall average was in the mid-300s: about 367 words for a newspaper article and 403 for an email. That is a more useful guide than any fixed target.