How the ACER literacy test works
You read about six texts of varying difficulty and answer about five questions on each. Some texts are ordinary prose; others are graphs, charts, diagrams or maps that you have to read and interpret. Most questions are multiple choice, and some ask you to judge a statement true or false, or answer yes or no.
The section is 30 questions on one clock: 30 minutes in the Victoria Police entrance exam, 35 minutes in the QPSea and the Fire Rescue Victoria Written Selection Test. Each section of these exams is timed and scored on its own, so the literacy clock does not borrow from the others.
Your raw mark is not what the employer sees. ACER converts it to a scale score on the Australian Core Skills Framework, from roughly 40 to 170, taking the difficulty of your questions into account. Victoria Police needs 105 or more on literacy, and Fire Rescue Victoria reports Standard Met or Not Met.
How to answer the questions
Work each text the same way:
- Read the questions for a text before you read the text closely, so you know what you are looking for.
- For a table, chart or map, read the title, the axis labels or column headings and any units or key before the numbers.
- Find the line or cell that answers the question and check the answer against it. Do not answer from what you know about the topic.
- On a true or false statement, test every part of it. One wrong detail, such as a day, a limit or an exception, makes the whole statement false.
- If a question will not resolve, mark your best guess and move on. You can come back to it before the clock runs out.
Worked example
A council notice reads: “The pool is open 6 am to 8 pm on weekdays and 8 am to 5 pm at weekends. Lap lanes are closed on Wednesdays from 4 pm for squad training. Children under 10 must be supervised in the water by an adult.”
True or false: “An adult can swim laps at 5.30 pm on a Wednesday.” The pool is open, but the lap lanes close at 4 pm on Wednesdays, so the statement is false.
True or false: “A 9-year-old may swim on their own if a parent watches from the stands.” The notice says supervised in the water, so this is false too. Both traps reward reading the exception rather than the headline.
Tips for the real ACER literacy test
- Pace at about 60 seconds a question for Victoria Police and 70 seconds for QPS and FRV. Reading every text twice is what puts people behind.
- Answer everything. ACER states that points are not deducted for incorrect answers, so a blank is the only answer that cannot score.
- Practise reading tables, charts and maps, not only prose, because some of the six texts are visual.
- In the Fire Rescue Victoria test, ACER may add unscored questions with extra time, so more than 30 questions on the day is normal.
- Sitting at home means ACER’s test app on your own laptop or desktop with a webcam and live supervision. Phones, tablets and work computers are not allowed, so check your set-up early.
- At Victoria Police you only re-sit the components you fail, and you get two attempts per application.
Practise the ACER literacy test on CogniPrep
Our ACER Literacy Skills test is 30 questions on six texts in 35 minutes, on one clock, with mixed multiple-choice and true or false questions. You can move back and forth and use a review grid to find blanks, and nothing is deducted for a wrong answer. At the end you get a score out of 100, based mostly on how many you got right, and a percentile against other CogniPrep users. It cannot give you an ACER scale score, because ACER does not publish how raw marks convert. For Victoria Police, aim to finish five minutes early.