April 26, 2025 by Doug McCurry from BooBook Education

Preparing for the GAT

What would be the optimal process to prepare students for the GAT?

It continues to be remarkable that the substance and significance of the recent changes to the VCE GAT are unrecognised. Since 2022 the GAT has been used to produce a strong standardised score for literacy and numeracy for all VCE students. Mysteriously and unfortunately, Vocational Major students only get a weak and undiscriminating scores from Section A for literacy and numeracy.

It is remarkable that this new and substantial assessment receives no public notice from the VCAA and the government (or the press), particularly when the results (95+% of VCE and VM students ‘achieve the benchmarks’ for literacy and numeracy) are so outstanding. It is surprising that no one wants to celebrate the excellent results that have been achieved at Year 12 when three years before 30+% of the same cohort did not reach the NAPLAN benchmark in Year 9. What a successful turnaround for the students and the system!

It seems that the VCAA wants the GAT to be as low profile and unobtrusive as possible. It did not put the first version of the GAT (with answers) on the website until a month before the test of 2022. The same for the test of 2023. Presumably the test of 2024 will be on the website just before the test of 2025. Even if one has a copy of the test, it is difficult to prepare for it without the answers!

The VCAA makes the usual claim about such generic skills test that ‘no special study is needed’ for the GAT. What is meant by ‘special study’ is unclear and one is left to wonder what the VCAA would advise as appropriate preparation for the GAT. (See the few VCAA Tips for Completing the GAT in the Appendix.) One hears that there is not much done in many Victorian schools to prepare students for the GAT. This is a significant disservice to their students.

It is common for testing authorities to advise that some preparation is worthwhile for generic skills tests. It has also been claimed that extensive preparation for such tests is not productive or worthwhile, but worldwide there is extensive (and expensive) coaching undertaken for high stakes skills tests. Locally there is a good deal of fee for service coaching for selective entry and scholarship tests.

It is worth asking what would be an optimal preparation process for the GAT.

Time management

The first things students have to understand is that (as in all tests and exams) time management is crucial in taking the GAT. It is the major weakness of assessments in test conditions that because the work is usually done under time pressure, time management skills become a crucial part of the assessment.

Students must use their time in a way that is most likely to improve their score and not waste time on things that are not likely to improve their score. In terms of time management, students should consider the relationship between the writing components and the MCQ, and the order with which they will do different parts of the test.

The GAT is unusual in that students are given a period of time and a number of components, and they can decide how they use the time. They are given indicative times for each component.

Part A is 30 minutes for writing and 90 minutes for MCQ presented in that order.

Part B is 30 minutes for writing and 60 minutes for MCQ presented in that order.

In the VCAA Tips for completing the GAT students are advised to: ‘Complete the tasks in the order they appear in the question book.’ Student should be advised to ignore this advice. It serves the interests of the test developers rather than the students. Test writers do not want students cherry picking the material as it distorts the test data, but such cheery picking is in the best interests of the students.

In terms of time management, students should consider the following.

• How do I use reading time well?
• What is the best order to do the different kinds of items?
• How would I best apportion the available time?

Students should not calculate that they can make up for a weakness in one component by strength in another. It is tempting for good writers to give more time to writing than numeracy (or vice versa), but this not a good strategy because it is easier to get an average score in two components than it is to get a high score in one component to compensate for a weak score in another component.

And in any case the GAT scores are reported separately. A set of average score for three components is better than one high and one or two low scores. Even students who have a strength in one area will benefit from striving to get better scores in their weaker areas. Students with a particular strength in one area should aim to deal with that area as quickly as possible so as to give more time and attention to areas the student finds more difficult, but only after they have done the items they do more easily more quickly.

Students must make sure they complete all items in their strong area and that they do not waste time on material they are not able to readily deal with. Some of that material will appear early in a test.

If students are doing items in the order in which they are presented they may decide to skip some material for the time being because they find it difficult and time consuming in the hope of returning to it later. Skipping material in this way does set up a rather complicated process of adjusting time on the run. (How quickly do I have to do this so I can go back to do that? Have I got time to finish and then go back to the items I left out?)

Student should think about what material they might do quickly and confidently. It might be only some of the reading or numeracy items that they can deal with confidently. It can be good to do the easier material first to see how much time is available later to spend on the more difficult material.

The writing tests are presented first in both Parts A and B. This is a reasonable place to start as students will be freshest to do what is arguably the hardest part of the test. If students do the writing tests first, they can use the reading time for planning. On the other hand, the reading time can be well used to skim the MCQ to get an idea about what would be easiest and hardest.

The optimal time management strategy for the MCQ is to do the easiest items quickly in the hope of gaining time that can be used on the hardest items. An individual can decide to see how much time they can make up on the easier items to spend on more difficult material when they have dealt with easier material.

Writing can be the hardest area to keep to a set time, and one can’t really just stop and then guess the rest as in the MCQ when the allocated writing time is up. If the writing is done first, the time taken should be carefully monitored as one goes. 

The GAT MCQ tests

The first kind of preparation for GAT MCQ is to help students understand the kind of things tested in MCQ items. The second thing is learning about the best strategies for doing MCQ items under time pressure.

I would propose that student begin preparation for the GAT by working their way slowly through a version of the test (without the answers) taking as much time as they like and in different sessions if they want.

Before doing such exploration, it would be best if students were given an introductory briefing about the items, particularly in terms of what is tested and assessed. They should be encouraged to think about what they are having to do and how they do it in such tests. In this initial exploration students should get a sense of how they have to think and what they have to do in taking the test.

Ideally the responses of this initial exploration would be scored by someone other than the student. (See the BBE Test Scoring Service.) The results would be given to them for all items, and there would be a session or sessions in which the way of determining the answers and likely misunderstandings and mistakes would be discussed, particularly on items that most students got wrong. In this debriefing session students would be encouraged to think about how they would get the correct answer to an item and why they might get an item wrong.

The next step would be to prepare students for doing time pressured versions of the MCQ test.

It would be best if this was done in simulation of the actual test conditions.

In this preparation for test conditions students should be briefed about the best strategies for dealing with MCQ in general and what might be the best strategies for them as individuals (and it will change of individuals).

See the comments on approaching the GAT MCQ in BBE Study Guide.

The GAT writing tests

The main issue for the writing tests is that students understand the tasks, what is tested in them, and why their performance will be judged to be strong or weak. These issues are not clear or simple, and students (and teachers) need to think about them.

• What is this writing task testing?
• What will be assessed in this task?
• What will be the characteristics of stronger rather than weaker performance?

The writing sections of the GAT are worth considerable teacher and student attention because the writing items test a truly generic skill. (To a certain extent the MCQ test is about doing MCQ type tasks whereas the writing test tests writing.) Time spent preparing for the GAT writing tasks is preparation for the writing skills tested in the English and other exams involving written responses. (‘Why don’t you English teachers teach them how to write an essay?’)

Teaching the GAT writing tests is teaching writing more directly than teaching the sections on text study and analysis of argument and language in the English exam. It is arguable that teaching the GAT writing is a better way of teaching writing than teaching the writing section of VCE English.

In preparing for English Section B a good deal of attention needs to be given to how to negotiate the hurdles of using a set title and a piece of required stimulus. And teaching the GAT can, of course, be fundamental to the literacy and numeracy areas of study for the Vocational Major.

See further comments on approaching the GAT Writing in the BBE Study Guide.

Appendix Advice from the VCAA